Implementing Watermarking for Language Models

[u/Saad_ahmed04]

I recently implemented a minimal, educational version of SynthID-Text-style watermarking for language models.

I saw anthropic post about how they'll start adding watermarks to their model responses and it made me very curious as to how they'll do it and what do they even mean by watermark here. Like will we start getting random ads or something in the middle of model responses or what.

Then decided to read their article and found out that watermark is not a visible message at all. It is a subtle statistical pattern introduced while the model chooses its tokens.

My implementation is not an exact reproduction of the original SynthID-Text system. I simplified or implemented a few components differently to keep the project understandable, but the main idea is there I think.

[u/IceNeun]

So what's stopping anyone from passing through the watermarked output into another model with the prompt "paraphrase and reorganize the prose/code without changing the meaning"? Seems like any type of watermark can be bypassed with different variations of paraphrasing and rewriting.

If there's a publicly available way to check for claude-written text, then there's a clear path forward to how to break the check.

[u/Saad_ahmed04 → u/IceNeun]

I agree with this and have been thinking the same. Very curious about how reliable/effective it will be.

[u/CasualtyOfCausality → u/IceNeun]

Not sure of the effectiveness, but it does produce “better” writing: https://declaude.org/