How AI text watermarking works

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• Hacker News
• I wonder how the keys and watermarking survives when you ask the model to write in the style of another author or something that deviates from its classic patterns. I once asked Claude a while back to write some short stories in the Expanse universe and style and be curious if the watermarking survived that text.
  by antilimit
• I wonder if this is for use in future legal battles over ownership/creation/invention of new software and/or concepts.

  For example, someone inventing a new technology might use AI to assist with code prototypes/doc prep etc. Where would that leave the rights of the owner/creator/inventor. These text watermarks provide fuel for legal battles.

  Am I wrong?

  by calif123
• I wonder if this will become a new revenue stream for providers. Want to know if Claude generated some text? There's a free web form you can paste into.

  Of course, you can also run your own check service if you pay some API fees, and those checks can be a lot more convenient for users since the services can check multiple sources, to whom they are paying for the privilege.

  Then someone washes the text through a local model that rewords it, the markers are lost, amd they're clear again.

  by techjamie
• One aspect that people seemingly aren't talking about is the impact this has in the model's creativity. Because the model will nudge each word towards group A vs group B, you're losing on creativity, especially more so if the nudge isn't a gentle 55% but something like 70% or 80%. So essentially they're forcing the model to be less creative for the upside that the longer the text the easier it is to detect the watermark.

  Here's a visual representation of the watermark: https://i.imgur.com/JNUIykX.png

  This is even worse in such forms of writing like coding, where there's even less choices the model can make on what the next token should be. Plain text in code will obviously be watermarked, that includes comments. But the code itself might get watermarked by choosing certain code over others more often.

  I'm inclined to believe the models will be instructed to not watermark code, especially since it's harder to detect reliably because the shorter the body of text the harder it is to detect, but who knows what Anthropic and all the other AI labs will decide to do in the future.

  EDIT: Also for those in the comments who are naive enough to think Anthropic is doing this just because the EU said so and not because it's beneficial to them (and all other AI labs), well, you are indeed naive. Identifying code will be paramount in training future models because the more synthetic data you feed it, the more cannibalization happens, the worse the models will perform over time due to lack of good data, among other such reasons as selling AI detection services to colleges, and a plethora of other reasons.

  by lemoncookiechip
• I almost never copy & paste AI-generated text, I almost always transcribe it by hand, which in turn forces me to read what the LLM generated and gives me the opportunity to replace words as I go. This obviously doesn’t scale, especially if your impact is measured by the number of software features you implement, but for more experienced engineers (Staff, Principal, and above) who are usually evaluated on the success of company-wide initiatives, I think this is the best course of action.
  by guessmyname
• New job idea: have a human reword/summarize and manually input/transcribe AI output to remove the watermarking. They use “tools” like dictionaries and thesaurus’ in order to sufficiently change the text so that it doesn’t fit within AI distribution anymore. Humans that can write significantly “organic” text will be able to make lucrative careers out of it.
  by throwatdem12311
• What's wild (imo) is pretty much everyone I talk to/read from (anecdata) HATES the way claude writes. I see it in the comments on Hacker News, hear about it in discussions with my colleagues, and talk about it with my non tech family. it's over the top bad. now it seems like these quirks will now be enforced in some weird way to meet the watermarking rules?
  by wpasc
• I could see this being useful in a world with a few AI providers. However, in a world of commodity AI models, can simply use a model from an AI provider that does not watermark. Or download any open source model and run it themselves [0].

  The only practical use I can see for this in the world we actually live in is to prevent model collapse. Most people using AI don't care if people training future AI ignore them, so would have no incentive to switch to providers that do not watermark. Of course, this disencetivises all if the pro-social applications of this technology, and risks giving the big providers a monopoly on "known human" data, which has serious antitrust implications.

  [0] Note that the watermark is not inherent to the model itself, but rather how the model is run. So this teqnique cannot be used by people providing open-weight models. It would need to be used by those actually running the models.

  by gizmo686