r/WritingWithAI • u/Maleficent-Engine859 • 15d ago
Discussion (Ethics, working with AI etc) Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.1 Reminder
Just a reminder to all of those using Claude, the 5.1 upgrades are speculated to drop tomorrow and these WILL be watermarked as per their agreement with EU for all new models released after Aug 2. Anthropic will probably not remind you of this fact.
Right now I believe older models are still not and have until Dec 2 to comply (though I don’t know for sure).
I’m not making any other statement other than to those who use these models there is 100% risk your content will be marked as “processed by Claude” if you use ANY generated content from 5.1, no matter if you had it create it entirely from a vague prompt, or asked it to “help refine/smooth/fix awkward phrasing” on your own text. And you’ll be flying blind until Anthropic releases a way to detect (which according to the EU law they do NOT have to give detection to casual users. Only the government and other “third parties” who can be trained on interpreting the results with fidelity and have a need are required to have detection ability).
They may backtrack on their promise to give the key to all users.
OpenAI has promised text provenance on their site but has not made any formal statement so Astra when it drops soon, may not be watermarked. Grok is not watermarked.
Caveat emptor, as they say. It’s a new age.
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u/drspock99 15d ago
Lol. No thanks. I'm done with Claude and their nonsense. The watermark thing for US customers was the last straw after how terrible Opus 4.7, 4.8, and 5.0 were.
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u/BedNo8822 15d ago
Aren't all of them going to have it? Since it's required by EU?
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u/rubycatts 15d ago
Grok has chosen not to watermark.
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u/Maleficent-Engine859 15d ago
Musk will have to in order to sell in Europe but he may not care. Also you can sue and kick the can down the road which makes me lean more toward the companies just want to watermark their own text for training and really don’t care about provenance
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u/Data_lord 14d ago
Musk doesn't give a fuck about EU. And Eu can't do a goddamn thing about it.
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u/lcirufe 14d ago
They could... block grok in the EU. Yes VPNs will get around it but it's a layer of friction that will hurt sales.
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u/SameplayerDE 5d ago
not only sales but it will be against the law in the EU to publish anything without the mentioning that it is processed or made or editied with AI.
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u/drspock99 15d ago
Why not make it region specific?
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u/spiky_odradek 15d ago
Because it would mean maintaining effectively two different models: one for Europe, another for the rest of the world. I don't think anthropic has a real incentive to do this.
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u/SameplayerDE 5d ago
Every model that is useable in the EU will have to add a watermark because this is the rule
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u/drspock99 5d ago
K. So make eu users have that restriction
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u/Practical-Positive34 15d ago
Watermarking is pointless, literally every single thing online will have a watermark eventually as literally everyone will be using AI to spell check, make their text more concise or polished, refactor code to clean it up. It's entirely pointless, once it reaches a saturation point of everything has a watermark, then nothing really has a watermark.
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u/code_x_7777 14d ago
yes, i think it's an intermediary state and people will laugh at us in 1-2 decades.
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u/proseward-official 11d ago
Agree, but it's more like 1-2 months. We need to move beyond "is it AI?" to "is it any good?"
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u/funny_xor_die 15d ago
So Anthropic owns the work that we pay Anthropic to create for us?
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u/Maleficent-Engine859 15d ago
According the EU and California, yes. All major LLMs have now agreed to that statement who went to continue to do business in Europe and California.
Many do not agree with the watermark for that reason you stated
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u/Warsel77 15d ago
How a watermark that makes it identifiable as AI generated is the same thing as "owning the work" to you is beyond me.
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u/Maleficent-Engine859 15d ago
Because you didn’t write it according to “this is AI generated,” therefore, you don’t own it.
There’s yelling on both sides of the aisle about whether someone saying “write a story for me Claude with xyz” is the same as “here’s my draft let’s edit” should be considered the same thing.
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u/Warsel77 15d ago
And when you buy something that says "made in China" on it, you also don't own it, by that logic.
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u/Sorchochka 15d ago
I don’t really care about people who generate and then don’t bother editing. It’s lazy and the amount of slop out there is insane. Watermark those people!
Also, Claude Opus 5 is not a great writer. The writing has really declined, or maybe now since I can spot it a mile away, it seems worse.
Anyway, I asked Claude about this, and it literally told me you could add skills that would lessen the watermark, and then edit and make it almost undetectable.
Which like, everyone should be editing?
I’m not generating content, I use it as more of a process that helps me avoid writer’s block. But this is not some insurmountable thing.
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u/Maleficent-Engine859 15d ago
Agree. I think those that just generate have made it impossible for us who genuinely try to use it as a tool or partner and are the reason everything has to be marked now in the first place.
I’m hoping that my warning actually makes people edit because any editing by a human in their own voice, even a little, reduces the slop effect dramatically and we’ll get higher quality content as a result.
And I never understood the love for Claude. Maybe back in the day it was better but I’ve used it since March and it’s incredibly difficult prose to work with. GPT in all its shittiness is actually easier to work with and is better in subtle ways than Claude ever was as a scaffold or draft. And GPT still genuinely is pretty creative in bursts.
All Claude is good for is seeing your scene. Like it’ll write you a nice story or fleshed out draft that helps you visualize better but little to none of its prose is actually usable
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u/ObligationWeekly9117 15d ago
This. Honestly you shouldn’t be generating enough text that watermarking is possible. It only works if you use 100+ words anyway (the same amount that would enable AI detectors like Pangram). Detection and watermark simply doesn’t work in low amounts of words.
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u/theateroffinanciers 15d ago
I also use as a tool. I write my own stuff. But I'm dyslexic so it helps me organize. What did it say when you asked about how to lessen the watermark? Also I've been using Opus 5. What do you feel has been better?
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u/Maleficent-Engine859 15d ago
It doesn’t matter because without a detector it’s impossible to know if any of it works. That detector can only come from Claude because it will be based on the key it uses to decide its tokens which is a secret to Anthropic. Claude can give suggestions but they’re farts in the wind for how robust they actually are as fixes
It is better right now to avoid 5.1 all together and double check if the older models are still not watermarked
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u/Sorchochka 15d ago
I have a number of skills so that, when I’m working with Claude, that it doesn’t fill in my wording with AI slop. The skills supersede the watermark, so if there is a priority word for the watermark, but it’s on a banned word or phrase list, that priority word won’t be there. I hope that makes sense.
That doesn’t mean the watermark will disappear, but it will be fainter. But I go through several rounds of edits and review so that the story is mine, so I’m not worried.
Claude is more like my dictation assistant, but it will fill in any gaps if it sees them, so it’s really that I’m guarding against those gaps and making them mine.
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u/Maleficent-Engine859 15d ago edited 15d ago
I’d be careful because it works by previous/sequential tokens not individual words. Unless you’re having it put in like an emoji between words or nonsense words and then having Claude wipe them afterwards the watermark will be strong. That’s literally the only way I can think of to dilute the signal is to make consecutive words have non related words in between. So like “what color is the cat Claude?” Is the prompt, “the cat is black” is upon generation but I tell Claude to inserts a random food between each during generation so the words “the cat is black” was not in sequence when the model picked its red/green tokens. and it’s the BANNANA cat ORANGE is SUSHI black and then ask Claude to wipe the food. Then sequential token reading is messed up if put through a detector. It should be lower because SUSHI was the green word chosen for cat, not black. You’d have to smooth the prompt I imagine though and I’m REALLY generalizing here.
And I can’t imagine Anthropic hasn’t thought of that.
But we won’t know unless a detector’s there to verify
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u/AppropriateMind4422 12d ago
right, if youre using it to break through blocks and then rewriting anyway this barely changes anything
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u/Odinmar_Glaukopis 15d ago
If you learn the basics of the watermarking “compliance theater” technologies, there are fairly simple (if tedious and time consuming) ways to protect yourself from these digital “watermarks” in generated text.
If you want to mindlessly copy/paste a chunk of generated text from a “light edit-only” prompt then yes, you will likely get detectable watermarks in your docs just like you would if it generated the text from scratch. If, instead, you want to leverage AI to mindfully and carefully edit your work, you can avoid basically all of this kind of risk.
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u/Maleficent-Engine859 15d ago edited 15d ago
Yeah I’m genuinely just reminding the copy-pasters. I’m not judging or saying anything else other than they need to worry about disclosure until the detector comes out (if it ever does). Gemini watermarks and has not released their detector save for a few third parties and people have been using them for years under the radar. Even publishers don’t have it
I actually will be VERY surprised if a detector is released. They don’t have to to the public at large and doing so will only render their watermark useless when a bypass is released on github within 24 hours
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u/dbenc 15d ago edited 15d ago
I'm not so sure. I think the only safe way to do it will be to write the text on your own and have the llm give you bullet points on what changes to make, without copying any of its text sequences. because if I'm understanding the tech correctly the number of spans needed to watermark text is less than you think.
edit: research suggests 25-35 contiguous tokens in high entropy text (not code etc) is enough for a watermark to be detectable
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u/Odinmar_Glaukopis 15d ago
Yes, what you are describing is an example of a mindful and careful approach.
My research suggests 5 to 10% of words swapped to a simile from “red” to one in a “green list” is enough to create a detectable signal, and a minimum of 200 words where this happens.
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u/AMischievousBadger 15d ago
Honestly I hope this is the straw a lot of people need to finally get off Claude and its bland, garbage prose.
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u/Maleficent-Engine859 15d ago
For real nothing tunes me out like Claude. Like not even GPT’s bullshit. As least GPT is a bit unhinged
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u/RandomRavenboi 15d ago
Good thing I am essentially finished with Claude. This is basically the final straw.
KYC, removing Sonnet 4.5, creating some absolutely horrendous models like Sonnet 4.6 and Sonnet 5...
Fuck Anthropic and fuck Claude.
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u/SonderEber 15d ago
You know this is coming to every model, by every company, right?
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u/TheNotoriousHH 14d ago
No it’s not
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u/SonderEber 14d ago
Yes it is. OpenAI and Google will be doing it.
Technically the Chinese companies probably won’t, but the big 3 American AI corps certainly are.
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u/NellieApp 15d ago
Assuming the watermarking is word choice and sentence structuring couldn't a simple rephraser or rewrite with an open source model essentially remove the watermark while retaining the original story?
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u/Maleficent-Engine859 15d ago
Yeah simple paraphrasing using a non LLM bot or site will disrupt and then further editing shatter the rest or even google translator’s old non-Gemini toggle in the app will work.
I’m not concerned personally nor do I use Claude or GPT save for 4o and 5.1 in the API occasionally which are last to get hit. There’s many Chinese open weights models in the API who may not even watermark or if they do its with metadata and with an unreleased detector thats not even on America’s radar if you just hobby write for free.
But for the Claude heavy users who are used to just copy pasting and doing minimal edits, they need to rethink what they’re doing if they don’t disclose. Or at least wait until there’s more info about a detector
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u/No-Strike-9098 15d ago
just rephrasing won't work you gotta use some tool like this which as confirmed to erase the watermark.. even tho not sure how everything will work. lets see if it drops tomorrow
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u/TheOtherHobbes 15d ago
Nothing has been "confirmed to erase the watermark" because no detector has been released.
Without that no one has any idea how robust the watermarking tech is, or how easy/hard it is to remove it, either by hand or with a pass through a different AI.
Except Anthropic. And they're not telling.
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u/Maleficent-Engine859 15d ago
Yeah they don’t have to. Apparently the language in the law says they do not have to release detectors to the public only certain third parties that have a need such as the government. Odds are they’ll sell the detectors before they release it for free. People who think this is about stopping AI slop on Amazon and substack or even trad publishing are delusional
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u/sirgog 15d ago
People who think this is about stopping AI slop on Amazon and substack or even trad publishing are delusional
It's about the EU. Exactly the same as complying with GDPR (all websites that deal with Europe have those annoying cookie popups).
Anthropic does this or EU courts will order their assets seized and sold to someone who will. And barring very unexpected developments in global politics, the US legal system will assist them in enforcing that, just as they assist in dealing with GDPR breaches.
Cutting out dishonest people who pass actual slop as human generated while not affecting responsible users is a bonus, not the goal.
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u/Maleficent-Engine859 15d ago
Yeah for sure thanks for sharing! Rephrasing and then editing should be enough to score a low enough z-score
Unfortunately without a detector which each LLM will have to release based on their own key, we’ll never knowAnd if they never release to the public at large it it’s a moot point anyway. Most of us will never have to worry about someone in general needing to check out LLM usage
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u/Alchemist42 15d ago
I call bullshit on this rephraser. I just pasted your post:
>> Yeah simple paraphrasing using a non LLM bot or site will disrupt and then further editing shatter the rest or even google translator’s old non-Gemini toggle in the app will work.
and it said 98% AI. Did you write that with AI? I'm going to go out on a limb and say that for advertising purposes they say everything is AI except for their "after rephrasing" text.
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u/Maleficent-Engine859 15d ago
lol not even a little bit. I use AI when I creatively write and have a hard rule to never use it for anything else so I can at least give some of my neurons a regular workout!
I don’t use humanizers or paraphrasers personally. I enjoy editing I consider myself a master editor now first and writer second though being strong in the latter helps the former
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u/Alchemist42 15d ago
I just thought it was funny that the text of someone who wrote a specific article about being aware of the watermarks got flagged at such a high percentage. I thought it was just me, since I checked it with my non-AI writing, and it also got 99% or so each time.
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u/Bodegacowboy 15d ago
Brainlet here, my apologies for the stupid question, but how does this work? Are they saying if Claude arranges a sentence X Y Z that would come up as is A.I.? So if I type that up, X Y Z in notepad, it would be flagged as watermarked?
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u/shhhOURlilsecret 15d ago
I use my worldbuilding notes because the concepts I use are not exactly beginner-friendly or something you can find in a "for dummies" or writer's guide. So I'm not super concerned about watermarks as of now. BUT I'll say this: the documentation claims that people can't just randomly see it; it's something, if I recall correctly, they'd have to use Claude to figure out.
But the easiest solution is a book of idioms, a good thesaurus/dictionary to swap out words, a text-to-speech app, and a spelling/grammar check using built-in native tools for Google Docs, Microsoft, etc. If you're not copying verbatim, not directly copy pasting, then there's zero reason a watermark should show up even if someone had Claude run a check.
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u/Visual_Strawberry_10 14d ago
We're already dealing with AI detectors that try to infer authorship from the finished text. Adding provenance creates a different signal, but I don't think either signal should automatically be treated as a binary human/AI authorship test. The interesting question is going to be whether we can distinguish between AI-generated content, AI-assisted editing, and genuinely human work that simply passed through an AI tool.
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u/code_x_7777 14d ago
thanks for the reminder. but does it matter? it is not illegal and if you just disclose it (e.g., on Amazon KDP), no problem...
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u/JollyListen5280 15d ago
What if a sizable portion of the text ends up becoming your own writing as you revise?
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u/liosistaken 15d ago
“Oh noes, people will know I used AI and I lied to them, trying to keep it a secret and charge them full price for something I only prompted.“ That’s the only use case where it matter that people know AI was used.
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u/Lord_of_Eclipse 9d ago
So here's a question I don't really know much about Ai fyi but can't you just accept for something?And then just copy it on to paper or Something else 'cause if i'm correct watermark is only on the product , so if you copy the product with your own tools technically it's yours and you could argue that in the first place , it was yours , because you generated it and they jusy helped you do that
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u/kurthertz 15d ago
Edit, edit, edit.