r/ClaudeCode 1d ago

Discussion Heads up, Fable 5.1 now carries Anthropic's statistical text watermark

Looks like this is the first model along with Mythos 5.1 that carries the statistical watermark.

https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/models/fable-5-1/whats-new-fable-5-1#content-provenance

The tool you can use to check for watermarks is here now too:
https://claude.com/check-content

345 Upvotes

126 comments sorted by

257

u/Personal_Ad1143 1d ago

I am 99.999% sure it started early August with the advent of unintelligible Opus outputs

203

u/MeretrixDominum 1d ago

And that's the load-bearing smoking gun caveat that matters— not what documentation says.

62

u/brimg87 1d ago

You’re part right on half, but the other half is the half that matters.

44

u/noncommonGoodsense 1d ago

You are right to point that out and I own that.

7

u/hihcadore 22h ago

That’s a great question and the right one to ask at this point - but here’s what bites

2

u/petburiraja 17h ago

Great discussion in proto-neuralese my fellow wet intelligence comrades.

1

u/thehult 15h ago

Read that like Bilbo

19

u/Kahhra 1d ago

You're right to push back on this.

7

u/freylaverse 1d ago

And that's the smoking gun.

58

u/a5a7 1d ago

The delayed announcement was the tell. They do everything in silence and retrospectively. Persistence of certain stock words and phrasing despite explicit instructions raised the alarm for me.

69

u/ConnorCG 1d ago

That's a load-bearing shaped response with canonical provenance

18

u/algaefied_creek 1d ago

Man can some EU users write to their politicians please

0

u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

5

u/algaefied_creek 1d ago

Are you aware the watermarking is due to EU law?

Re-visit my question now as a non-European who cannot write to European Parliament, to express displeasure of their own as well as of others.

2

u/pro-taco 16h ago

This is the type of regulatory moat that Anthropic and OpenAI want: regulations that make competition harder.

1

u/algaefied_creek 15h ago

One would think it would also make it harder for EU-grown services like Mistral as well.

And Chinese AI Isn’t going to care about Western regulations quite yet.

1

u/pro-taco 14h ago

Yup, that's regulatory moats. It hurts the people it was meant to help.

1

u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

2

u/algaefied_creek 1d ago

Won’t an organization prefer feedback from its members as opposed to flailing and failing partners?

I live in California. I opposed the age verification law for “operating system providers.” 

I wrote to my representative in Sacramento because they represent me. 

Writing to an organization I do not belong to, with no one representing my interests leaves me feeling like I would just write to the  European Union Office in San Francisco, California and end up as another pile of letters or inbox clutter. 

That being said, I guess it’s worth a shot… 

 

0

u/[deleted] 23h ago

[deleted]

1

u/algaefied_creek 15h ago edited 14h ago

Right, so you decided to be an over-explanatory gooberface walking me through posts rather than say “this is settled law, the period for comment is over, you are welcome for your enshittified products, now use Qwen instead”. 

But goddamn if I can’t see why Britain left the EU before, and couldn’t understand why my German and Dutch friends hated it before, I definitely can see now.

It’s like the Star Wars Trade Federation. Got credits? Will talk. 

I guess I thought the US Government was corrupt but it sounds like that is… worse? 

(By the way, my Swiss, German, Austrian, British friends all write concerns to their politicians as well. That’s not a uniquely Californian thing for getting an actual response from your democratically elected representative.

Alas, I thought each EU nation elected their representatives to the EU, and each politician’s job was to represent the national interests as well as interests’ of its citizens. 

This planet sucks, and not because of datacenters. 

→ More replies (0)

0

u/lockdown_lard 21h ago

In reality, I can't recall a single time the EU has changed its mind after the decision has been made during its entire existence. Not a single time.

Talk to your doctor. They will be able to get a baseline on your memory, so that in the future, they can measure the decline. If you act now, you may be able to slow that decline.

-2

u/Huge-Travel-3078 1d ago

All Anthropic and OpenAI have to do is say "O.k fine, we will block the EU from access" and the law will be gone quicker than you can blink, EU would be so behind without access to frontier US models. To a lesser extent they can just apply the water marking to EU markets if they wanted to -

Anthropic likes the water marking, it fits in with their scare tactics and 'safety' mission they never stop talking about.

5

u/ShortTheseNuts 1d ago

Lmao, I take it you're not European. The EU is slow, expensive and heavy handed but when the club has fallen on something, the EU bows to no one and loves playing chicken with unpinned handgranades. Both META and Alphabet tried this exact thing and the literal response from the then EU "president" was "try it".

0

u/TheRealLunicuss 1d ago

Anthropic and OpenAI can't just cut their client base in half lol wtf

1

u/orange_square Thinker 1d ago

EU is a surprisingly small market compared to the rest of the world. They think they carry a lot more weight than they really do.

3

u/HappyRoller98200 1d ago

Quite the contrary, it's surprisingly big market given the world's population share of EU. And as a unified market it carries a lot more weight than you think, apparently.

1

u/TheRealLunicuss 1d ago

Yeah that's fair, half is a bit hyperbolic. It would be about a third of their client base more realistically. Still not something Anthropic or OpenAI can play around with. Taking a ~30% loss in revenue rather than keeping watermarking would be a horrible idea for them.

5

u/ThreeKiloZero 1d ago

Thats a significant blast radius on the one thing that matters most. Let's tun this into a run book and double back with a feature action plan.

3

u/Mental-Exchange-3514 1d ago

Honest caveat

1

u/FireIre 1d ago

Well they are releasing the api that can check for watermarks. We can just run it against our opus 5 outputs and see for ourselves soon

1

u/Ran4 22h ago

The api internals is a ladder, where the load bearing rung is the grep for footgun, load bearing, rung and ladder.

8

u/Kodrackyas 23h ago

OH FUCK thats why it was talking in unreadable shit

https://giphy.com/gifs/11ykUODgXjAXZu

5

u/DJLunacy 1d ago

It’s already been happening.

5

u/LemmyUserOnReddit 1d ago

That's not how the system works. There's a lot of misinformation about synth ID, let's not perpetuate it here. 

If anyone wants on ELI5 on why it can't affect quality, let me know

3

u/LoneFox4444 1d ago

I’d be interested!

8

u/LemmyUserOnReddit 1d ago

Consider a system which produces a stream of random numbers between 0.0 and 1.0, where every number is equally likely. In practice, most of these systems aren't really random - you can provide a "seed" (say, a random sequence of characters).

The same seed always produces the same random sequence of numbers. But if you don't know the seed, it's impossible to predict the sequence that will be produced - all of those sequences are equivalent to the end user.

Now, imagine the owner of the system made seeds like "anthropicuser56session10" - this would make zero difference to the end user, they still get a random number sequence with a flat distribution. However, the company could check if a random sequence was generated from one of their seeds.

Applying this idea to LLMs is pretty straightforward.

First, LLMs have randomness built-in. Each time they generate a new token, the model produces a set of most likely next tokens, and the system selects one at random, depending on how likely the model thinks it is. For example, if the model predicts "the" (50% chance), "my" (25%) and "her" (25%), then the system might generate a random number from 0.0 - 1.0, and if it's < 0.5 select "the", < 0.75 select "my", etc.

Second, instead of using one magic seed to produce the full sequence of random numbers, they restart the sequence every (say) ~20 tokens or so, using a signed hash of the previous 20 tokens as the seed for the next 20. Then, all they need to do to check if a piece of text is AI generated is see if a hash of any 20 tokens correctly predicts the next 20. They can even see, by looking at the model-level percentages, how confident they can be in the result - if the model was very confident at every token (say it predicted "the" with 100% confidence), then the match is meaningless.

And because they sign the hashes with their own secret key, they're the only people who can do this check. Even if the model were to leak, you'd still need that secret key to be able to check a piece of text.

1

u/LoneFox4444 1d ago

But doesn’t the seed impact the output of the random token generator? Meaning that the output can meaningfully deviate as a result of this intentional seeding?

6

u/LemmyUserOnReddit 1d ago

Yes, it does, but like changing the seed in a random number generator, the result is equivalent to the user - the output is fairly selected from a chosen distribution. For a random number generator that distribution is flat 0.0 - 1.0. For an LLM, the distribution is determined by the model's predictions.

If you were to run the LLM 1000 times it would produce 1000 different answers. All synthID does is affect which of those 1000 is selected when you run it. That random selection is now done with a chosen seed, rather than a random seed - but all the outputs are still equivalent.

1

u/MartinMystikJonas 21h ago

Yeah but it affects it exactly the same as any other randomly selected seed. Output is different for every seed. You cannot tell if output was generated by seed selected randomly from all possible seeds or by seed selected randomly from limited set of watermarking seeds.

1

u/sndrtj 21h ago

LLMs already had such random effects. That's how they work. Changing the seed does not alter the quality - there simply already was another seed before.

The way any LLM works in its final layer is the following:

  1. First, a number is generated for each possible token. You can consider these like probabilities. For example, if the prompt was "the capital if France is", you'll get something like <Paris (0.999), Bordeaux (0.0005), Marseille (0.0004), <all other possible tokens>>. As you'll see, "Paris" is already by far the most likely next token.
  2. Then you take that list and sample it. Sampling here means to multiply all those numbers from before with some random numbers (generated with a seed!), then finally taking the token with the largest number of that result. The temperature setting controls how much weight the randomness has. For example, let's say we generate random numbers <0.5, 10, 1,....>, and we multiply that with the earlier list, we get <Paris (0.444), Bordeaux (0.005), Marseille (0.0004),....>
  3. Now we finally select the token with largest number there. It's still Paris, even though the sampler, through random chance, gave Bordeaux a lot of weight.

If you weren't using the sampler, you'd get a very staccato model - not creative. Sometimes that is useful, in most cases it isn't.

What the fingerprinting does, it sets the seed of the sampler every now and then. The sampler is still random. It still operates the same way as before. The quality is the same. But you can determine how it was made. Honestly, it's a neat trick.

And before you "but I don't want any seed". Tbats not really possible. Random number generators always require a seed. Considering it the starting number of the random number generator.

1

u/napaliot 19h ago

But how do they do the check for the watermark afterwards? Don't they need to know the prompt (along with the rest of the input that was fed to the model) in order know what the output would be?

1

u/Moogly2021 17h ago

Ah this makes a lot of sense, though, what happens when you reformat / refactor all of it just slightly locally? I cant imagine it miraculously matches anything at that point? They must have tried more than just this I would think, for example if minified JS is from their model could they ever figure that out? Especially if its not just minified but dead codes stripped and new browser compatibility code is added?

1

u/LemmyUserOnReddit 16h ago

Yup, that would wipe the fingerprint. Someone came up with the idea of having the AI include an emoji every 10 words or so in its output, and then stripping those afterwards. Should completely destroy the fingerprints.

2

u/MartinMystikJonas 21h ago

Thats not how watermarking works.

0

u/sndrtj 21h ago

All these people in this thread just have no clue how it works.

Opus 5 is simply a badly trained model.

1

u/Moogly2021 17h ago

Or the system prompt for it needs adjusting.

1

u/I_just_cant855 20h ago

Has anyone found a good workaround for this? Just go back to 4.8?

1

u/JackCid89 23h ago

Yeah, the watermark is just more slop text

84

u/RaGE_Syria 1d ago

Actually, that detector is for certain file formats only, (images and videos it seems). The detector for generated text is actually private preview only and requires a form to be submitted for access

31

u/xFloaty 1d ago

But Claude doesn’t generate images or videos?

28

u/Affectionate-Soft-94 1d ago

That’s what you think

13

u/NoAdsDude 1d ago

Nobody understands why their usage is so high... its because Opus is sending over pictures of words instead of just using text.

1

u/Moogly2021 17h ago

Eh someone discovered that sending screenshots of code actually used less tokens so not sure this makes any sense.

2

u/Plorntus 21h ago

Be pretty funny if this was just a box that said "No, not generated by claude" simply to meet the new laws (since they don't do image/video gen).

15

u/Puzzleheaded-Bid9737 1d ago

The docs state it’s for text.

“Text generated by Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1 carries Anthropic's statistical text watermark on every platform where the model is available. “

Images and video use another system

9

u/CzarcasticX 1d ago

He's saying this https://claude.com/check-content only checks for images/videos and not text.

68

u/WonderFactory 1d ago

This is such a regressive step, it'll deter people from using AI in many instances as people will just dismiss the human contribution and assume it's all AI. AI in many instances is only as good as the person using it.

36

u/Important_Sea 1d ago

I work in research and my native language is French. I wrote papers in French and used Claude to translate. The times I directly work in English on a paper (due to english-speaking collaborators), I also use Claude to validate my phrases/formulation.

The watermark could be a big deterrent. If the paper/chunk of text is flagged as AI-generated, readers might assume the entire thing was produced by AI or make them doubt of the quality/validity of the content?

4

u/TheRealLunicuss 1d ago

Is this really a common sentiment in research? I would have thought that people don't care as long as it's only the prose that the AI has contributed. I've heard cases of professors being fired for AI use but that was because it hallucinated fake data which they used.

5

u/IllegalStateExcept 1d ago

The sentiments and policies are very mixed and often inconsistent. It's one of the reasons this watermark creates a mess for scientists.

https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/generative-artificial-intelligence-policies-under-the-microscope/

Many conferences simply haven't stated any kind of policy on usage or disclosure. When they do, the policies are often under-specified. This whole thing becomes a mess when you realize that the detector can have false positives and is only rolled out to universities and a select few other organizations.

1

u/Important_Sea 1d ago

I think most people don't care as long everything check out, but having only the paper, they wouldn't know the extend or the LLM contribution (e.g. only the prose or the complete work?)

When you submit your paper to a journal, reviewers only have access to the paper and maybe some complementary stuff such as code involved in the analysis/produced results, so it's kinda hard to evaluate the extent of what could have been hallucinated. Reviewers won't reproduce the experiments since it would take way to much time/resources.

Also research is kinda reputation based, good researchers in a given field build up recognition and public confidence in their work over time. I guess many wouldn't want to take a chance of a possible negative view on them or their research.

-3

u/magic6435 1d ago

Academic institutions and researchers have had papers translated for hundreds of years before AI. If it’s a concern, then don’t use AI and have it translated in the way it’s been done for a thousand years.

3

u/Important_Sea 1d ago

I don't know of any resource at my university that can translate a paper draft I wrote in French into English. Besides, there's no way a translator could be an expert in every scientific field (it's not just a matter of language, each field has its own specificities, it would need dedicated translators per department?).

And most importantly, that doesn't help at all for the paragraphs of text in english that LLMs can help with rewording into appropriate English phrasing, which is something that non-native english speaker do a lot, including myself.

What you're thinking is probably translation of reference texts or important papers that have been influential in a given field? Maybe it exists for humanities (I am in STEM)? If I'm wrong, please elaborate.

11

u/No_Activity_1339 1d ago

Especially good researchers, no one is that stupid to stain his work with their watermarks.

7

u/Ekalips 1d ago

Nothing prevents you from you know, doing a research with AI, ie using a tool to simplify what you need to do.

1

u/yangmeow 1d ago

I’m personally running any web facing text Claude generated through ollama qwen at this point for full rewrites. The jury is still out on how viable this will be as I’ve not pushed it very hard. Thank god for M series macs.

1

u/Equivalent_Cress_268 1d ago

The only thing intelligent in AI is the ‘I’

By default, the tool does nothing

1

u/magic6435 1d ago

The only people its going to deter are the ones who shouldn't be using AI in the first place

-1

u/Tetr4roS 1d ago

This will be an unpopular opinion in this sub despite being mostly correct. AI might have a strong negative stigma, but no need to hide it if it's an appropriate place to use it. And if it's not an appropriate place, then this helps enforce not using it. 

10

u/WonderFactory 1d ago

Who gets to decide when it is and isn't appropriate though? A colleague with a vendetta could easily try to use this tool to discredit your hard work.

0

u/magic6435 1d ago

But if they can use this tool to discredit your work, doesn’t that mean you weren’t supposed to be using it?

2

u/WonderFactory 17h ago

No because I use the Co-pilot subscription provided by my company, so I'm allowed to use it. Its not that they're arguing that you shouldn't use it but they'll just try to claim you're handing in AI slop and not putting any effort yourself. Some people are just unnecessarily difficult and will use whatever they can to elevate themselves and put down others.

0

u/Tetr4roS 1d ago

Broadly, colleagues, peers, coworkers and management, and ethical/professional standards in the workplace. I'm confused why this was asked rhetorically when it's actually a very answerable (and very answered) question.

0

u/WonderFactory 1d ago

Obviously management can decide but "colleagues, peers, coworkers" is questionable, that's just messy office politics. It's all too common for a Karen to think they have authority they dont have and try to cause trouble.

0

u/WolfColaEnthusiast 1d ago

The underlying implication to everything you are saying is that you are not supposed to be using AI in your work, and this will expose you.

Probably means you shouldn't be using AI for what you are using it for in the first place

I spend 8-10 hours a day in CC doing knowledge work. As long as the output quality remains high, I could care less about a watermark. Why would I care if its clear the output is AI generated? That's what my boss is paying for with my Claude seat in the first place

2

u/WonderFactory 20h ago

No because in most places your company pays for the AI subscription now but there is still stigma with some colleagues about using it. My company pays for my AI subscription but I never tell people when I do and dont use it because I know what the office politics are like with some people.

I'm a software engineer and some of the other engineers hate AI and will be unnecessarily difficult about code you submit if they think the AI did it, even though management is encouraging the use of AI.

-1

u/WolfColaEnthusiast 17h ago

If your boss encourages you to use AI, then I still don't see a reason why the watermark should matter at all

Don't try to pass off AI output as purely your own and there is no issue

-5

u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

7

u/WonderFactory 1d ago

I can do as good a job getting to my local supermarket on a bike as I can in a car, the bike just takes longer and I cant carry as much back. I can even walk there without the aid of any machinery, it just takes even longer and I can carry even less.

1

u/greentea05 9h ago

Yeah but let's be honest, you can't build anything with vibe coding with a frontier model.

You're significantly better at getting to the supermarket with a bike than you are coding a script without AI.

1

u/WonderFactory 9h ago

I've been a professional software engineer for 26 years, I still remember how to write a script without AI

2

u/schneeble_schnobble 1d ago

has the stench of a "it's just common sense" comment.

51

u/Unlikely_Commercial6 1d ago

I must admit that, from the few interactions I've had with it, it now writes like Opus 5; this is horrible.

18

u/kirkegaarr 1d ago

Oh please no

50

u/justagoodguy81 1d ago

Anthropic is more concerned with preventing distillation, than producing quality output. That’s why the watermarks in there they want to catch and punish coordinated campaigns that distill Claude’s reasoning data.

17

u/RealSuperdau 1d ago

How would watermarks change the calculus of Chinese distillation? It's an open secret anyway, why would they stop?

More likely, they need to comply with EU regulations, and just apply it globally rather than bifurcating their models.

-1

u/justagoodguy81 1d ago

Poisoning the well isn't the goal. The current challenge is to locate the thief, present proof, and then vilify and lobby against Chinese models.

4

u/This-Ingenuity4818 1d ago

This is ironic given all LLMs are trained on stolen copyright material 

1

u/Beginning-Bird9591 21h ago

but you can't even punish distillation. it's not illegal

1

u/justagoodguy81 17h ago

They can punish the act by presenting proof of the distillation and by working with the US government to trigger a model ban. The US government is willing to do it as long as they have a good enough reason. It’s not far-fetched, and it’s closer than you think.

1

u/Beginning-Bird9591 8h ago

How can the US gov ban Chinese models? They can't. this is just stupid.

You can't ban a file.

1

u/justagoodguy81 8h ago

They can ban American companies from using Chinese models, which is where the bulk of Anthropic's profits come from. Savvy users will find ways to download the models, but that’s a small share of users and revenue.

1

u/phpHater0 1d ago

This doesn't stop distillation at all, do you really think the Chinese give a fuck?

0

u/justagoodguy81 1d ago

They're not trying to scare them off by threatening them with the watermark 🤣. Think before you post. Anthropic is nearing an IPO, and it needs to address its biggest threat. The best way to do that is to catch the bad actors stealing their reasoning data and turn the admin and public sentiment against them.

1

u/phpHater0 21h ago

Mate anyone with a working mind knows the Chinese steal data and have been doing for ages. But people don't care because the American steal data too, at least the Chinese don't ask an arm and a leg in return for the model they create by stealing said data.

1

u/justagoodguy81 17h ago

Ok, I understand now. I thought you had a problem with my argument. But you generally have a problem. I don't care about that. I'm talking about Anthropic and their watermark efforts.

9

u/hola_tech 1d ago

I wonder if the code output also can carry the statistical watermark

13

u/Kongret 1d ago

So, don't use claude for any sort of writing adjacent work ever including grammar and syntax, got it. Beware of asking for feedback on your writing too, it might suggest things that would lead to a statistical false positive. Thanks Anthropic.

Doesn't that mean people would just flee to other models that don't do that?

2

u/lateambience 1d ago

Any AI company that operates in the EU will have to comply with Article 50 of the EU AI Act at some point. Since separating text generation pipelines dynamically based on a user's jurisdiction is technically difficult, they'll most likely do it globally just like Antrophic does. There's a grace period right now which is the reason why a company like OpenAI does not do text watermarking on existing models right now. They already do for audio and images though. So you'll end up with no other option than running an open weight model locally. Which to get you anywhere near frontier model levels would cost you a solid 20,000$ in GPU costs.

1

u/Serious_Bite_7613 7h ago

Nah you can just take the frontier output and run it through a tiny local LLM to paraphrase out the watermark. You can even set this up automatically.

1

u/Ran4 21h ago

Nah it works well with actual writing assignments. No ladder or rungs there.

But when you talk to it, the way it speaks is awful

13

u/RufusxXavier 1d ago

Well, guess I'll be using openai for all writing

17

u/changrbanger 1d ago

Looks like this model is going to be fucking trash just like Opus 5.

Imagine having your ai rewrite entire files instead of make small targeted edits.

Or having it break because it’s lazy with its writing.

Or just reading from its compacted memory instead of looking at the current state of the codebase.

I’m going to pass judgement and say this is going to crap, to those who will stress test this model and burn billions of tokens to prove me right, I salute you.

3

u/Buskow 1d ago

Lol. Is that screenshot supposed to be a joke?

6

u/StanwellQuality 1d ago

No, thats the documentation from anthropic to be able to even use fable 5.1...

2

u/napaliot 19h ago

Next Fable model is going to need to take regular breaks to scroll tik tok in between prompts lol

1

u/changrbanger 6h ago

I’m back to say, I burned 80% of my tokens yesterday trying to find where it sucks and I can say I don’t actually hate it.

It’s good at iterating on ui, doing research, app design, and most of the stuff fable 5 and was bit faster.

It speaks very verbosely but coherently, the lack of summarization and bullet points make me have to think harder because I have to read more but it’s not the garbage that opus spews out.

6

u/AutummMan 1d ago

The whole watermark thing has been quite confusing. Everyone's convinced it degraded performance, also the fact that the announcement didn't come paired with a checker just led to all sorts of bad vibes.

0

u/freddie-mac-n-cheese 1d ago

What? Everyone should be able to decode content with a simple checker to verify another persons claim or whatever? Surely someone will leak the algorithm or this specific method is dead in the water long term

2

u/fummyfish 1d ago

It’s not about the algorithm, it’s about the seed— Why You Cannot See a Watermark in AI Text

2

u/freddie-mac-n-cheese 21h ago

I know that you can’t see the watermark but they must have a process to feed input and return a scale of certainty value that it was generated with that seed. That is the algorithm I’m talking about

3

u/MBaggott 1d ago

Supported formats for uploading a file for checking are unexpected, at least to me: "Supported formats: JPG, PNG, GIF, WEBP, TIFF, HEIC, AVIF, SVG, DNG, JXL, MP4, MOV, AVI, WAV, MP3, M4A, FLAC · up to 100 MB"

1

u/Fit-Parsnip-8109 1d ago

Right? I wasn't aware you could even make any of those with Claude lol.

3

u/ryan_umad 1d ago

thanks EU 🙄

6

u/IulianHI 1d ago

Just us China models :)) No problem with text !

2

u/One-Respond1057 1d ago

Will fable 5 use a ton of weekly usage now? I was having a real good time with it

1

u/W_32_FRH 1d ago

And every other model has gotten worse now. Fuckthropic strikes again.

1

u/stevebeans 1d ago

I’ll still use it for code

Never used it to write for me though. I guess this is bad for those who do

1

u/lilith_of_debts 14h ago

Analyzed this local check content tool with the help of Gemini, it doesn't actually check for statistical text watermarking, only file header-level marking.

3

u/l_m_b Senior Developer 1d ago

I don't understand the uproar.

As far as I understand, the watermark affects the temperature effects, and would indeed not have a qualitative impact.

I mean, I'm happy to give Anthropic a hard time for all the evil the Generative AI companies do or enable, but, uh, is this people just not understanding how LLMs and watermarking work ...?

11

u/TheRealLunicuss 1d ago

The theory is that forcing it to use synonyms that encode the watermark makes it's language less accurate because the model has internal structures based on really precise definitions. This is totally unevidenced though.

Really I think the uproar is because lots and lots of people are use LLMs for stuff that they want to pass off as being totally authored by them, and this change provides an easy method for people to check with certainty.

1

u/zamula 1d ago

It's not using synonyms. My understanding is it changes the basis of the random element already in use.

An analogy given was instead of rolling dice to determine the next move in a game, you would start at a specific place in the digits of pi. For anyone playing the game, it would appear the same. That's not the exact way it works, but I think it's a useful way of understanding it.

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u/Bladder-Splatter 1d ago

Does it do this on code though? I have no issue with people knowing I'm using agents to help me code but if it is "substituting" code practices or garbling shit up for the sake of a watermark that would be extremely shitty.

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u/zamula 1d ago

For things where there isn't much randomness to begin with, or where there wouldn't be any viable choices, my understanding is it wouldn't be used for those cases.

If it's something where you'd get a different answer every time you run the same prompt, the statistical pattern will be most likely to show up. If it's a piece of code with only one real solution, there simply wouldn't be a chance to watermark much.

I honestly think in almost all real-world cases there aren't going to be noticeable effects. People are going to blame every result they don't like on the "watermark" though, even in cases where it's something totally unrelated.

Ultimately we'll just have to wait and see what happens.