Top
Best
New

Posted by ropbear 1 day ago

Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing(daringfireball.net)
767 points | 677 commentspage 14
DrBazza 9 hours ago|
So Anthropic goes on the shit list with Sony Blu-ray and its cinavia watermarking.
dev1ycan 15 hours ago||
While I like that LLMs won't be able to produce the entire internet anymore, I am worried that the real reason for this move is for Anthropic to claim everything is theirs even though they STOLE humanity's collective knowledge including billions in private property worth of knowledge (or maybe even trillions), and all they do is regurgitate it, but now with a watermark on top as if it was theirs.
einpoklum 15 hours ago||
Are we now going to live in a world in which people bitch and moan about large private corporations' LLM text generation service and whether it's good or bad etc.? As though they're supposed to be benevolent and serve the public interest? They're not and they don't. Also, write your own damn text.

> "My error was believing Anthropic"

The error is rearranging part of one's life around Anthropic.

gilrain 15 hours ago||
Best writer I’ve ever seen not understand writing. Proof positive that you needn’t understand something to produce lots of it!
aenis 19 hours ago||
The same absolute morons who gave us cookie consent strike again.

I swear, one of those days I will get into politics just to fight those two things, and the cottage industry of batshit crazy lawyers that gave birth to those things.

vrganj 18 hours ago|
The cookie consent banner is not the EU's fault.

It's either don't track or ask for consent. The fact that the industry chooses to track is not on the EU.

aenis 12 hours ago||
Its more nuanced than that. Even companies that do not track, and use only essential cookies, ask for consent, as the consensus among compliance teams and external lawyers is "its safer this way". Thats the reality which the regulators failed to anticipate.

Of course this misses a bigger point that tracking in the web moved in a direction that requires no cookies whatsoever, and if anything, feels more pervasive than it ever was.

And it misses the even bigger point, that the morons who legislated cookie consent did not notice either of those two realities. And the same thing is already true with the AI act; the text watermarking is trivially defeated and everyone knows it. And I'd bet it will remain a requirement for the next decade or three.

Create 16 hours ago||
"possibly build tools to take a chunk of writing and try to remove your fingerprint from it, i.e, protect anonymity,"

The standard procedure to do this, is to chain translations to other languages and back. The message remains, but the wording will pick up some noise. --Dec 30, 2008.

avadodin 15 hours ago||
This is the obvious solution to watermarking text in a way that isn't easily removed by a dumb tool.

The output quality will likely suffer as stated in the article although this can be mitigated to an extent by only enabling it on more irrelevant filler text while leaving the more functional sections untouched.

The solution using Unicode tricks amounts to malicious compliance as only the most unsophisticated users are going to fail to remove the AI watermarks when trying to pass off AI slop as their own prose.

The real solution here is not having stupid EU–tier laws in the first place.

iammjm 17 hours ago||
Great, now Claude will sound even more generic. It’s not only annoying - it’s also dumb. We are all correct to push back on this load-bearing issue
luckydata 11 hours ago|
is that why everything Claude writes lately sounds like a riddle?
More comments...