I wonder how much output text it would take to work out the key that the watermarker is using?

I can't believe I got this in one. I guessed a math PhD interested in steganography could come up with a good method in a week, and an idiot like me figured it out in 5 minutes.

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.

AI writing at its finest

okay so text generated in America by and American AI will be watermaked to make Brussels happy? and then (only) elite companies will have access to some portal to they can label text as AI generated?

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?

From now on, a programmer can no longer claim that they wrote the code themselves when it was written by AI, in a way that could bypass this issue.

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.