Key phrase. And I'm not saying fraud in the legal liability sense. If you're not trying to hide the fact that something was LLM generated, then you have no reason to remove it. If you are trying to hide it, then there's probably a reason, i.e. you would face consequences for doing so, therefore it is fraud.
People underestimate the value of rules that only take malice and a little knowledge to break.
Currently I can recognize AI text because I read thousands of ai generated text. I know that 110% of yahoo finance news is generated. I don't want to read an AI generated personal blog, but if I do what's the problem really? Other than the companies distinguishing AI text for getting better training data, how do people benefit from watermarked text exactly?
But if we're talking about deterministically taking some watermarked LLM output and having a function removeWatermark(text), it won't necessarily be "trivial" to remove, because the watermark function itself need not be public. Only the API that tests for the watermark need be public, right?
Anthropic's magic watermark could be, like the article mentions, something like "every 7th semicolon has a N% chance to be a comma where N is the sum of the last X characters mod Y, and every character in the bit range q1...q2 has a Z% chance to..." etc etc etc. And if Anthropic controls those variables, it would be very difficult to determine the rule, even with some pretty advanced analysis (I would assume). And keep in mind, that example rule I mentioned is pretty naive, too. I expect the actual rule would be way more advanced and not so straightforward as "swap every <charX> for a <charY>"
For Anthropic, it’s highly likely that the watermark is a SynthID type mark similar to the one that Sean is talking about (I actually ran the analysis here https://johnjwang.com/post/2026/08/12/how-claude-watermarkin...). When we get confirmation of whether all models actually are watermarked, I think we’ll be even more confident.
Of course it’s always possible that Anthropic has come up with a proprietary scheme, but I think it’s definitely harder to implement.
I think the game will be a cat and mouse game similar to LinkedIn and other websites trying to block scrapers: each iteration makes it harder for someone to figure out the watermarking scheme, but likely not impossible
ch_sm•55m ago
just make an API that returns the string distance between a previously generated paragraph and the query?
that would sidestep this whole problem class.
regulators could even specify how that has to work.
what am i missing?
dpoloncsak•51m ago
dTal•37m ago
- watermark-free generation
- the stripping of watermarking from the output of SAAS models
Any discussion of watermarking is dead in the water in a world where we are permitted to have these things. I fear for the future.
thisoneworks•25m ago
mirashii•7m ago
They store some prompts and responses, not all, that's what you're missing.