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simonw 11 hours ago

> When a supported Claude model generates text, it weaves an imperceptible watermark directly into the text itself. You won’t see it, and it doesn’t change the meaning, quality, or readability of Claude’s response.

I'd like to know a lot more about how that works.

A lot of my interactions with Claude return pretty precise text. If I ask it to edit a project and refactor a specific function in several places I know exactly what I want to happen, it will NOT be OK if those refactors have some kind of weird pattern baked into their text to act as a watermark.

I guess this may be covered by this:

> Content generated by Claude may not carry a detectable mark if, for example: [...] The passage is very short, leaving too little text for a reliable signal;

COAGULOPATH 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>I'd like to know a lot more about how that works.

My guess is that it works like Gemini's SynthID: by altering the logprobs of the next token.

Like, for every 10th token, instead of outputting the most probable, it outputs the 17th most probable, or something. (Obviously it's way more complicated but I think conceptually this is how it works.) No human will notice this, but a classifier trained on Claude's output will.

So it's not like the watermark is the words "le epic bacon" and Claude will output "le epic bacon" in everything. That would be extremely annoying (and easy to defeat).

thunfischtoast 2 hours ago | parent [-]

They still need to choose when to do that though. When I prompt the program to e.g. alter a bash script in a specific way or to recite a longer known text it can't go round and randomly exchange tokens. It has to somehow define what is a simple repeated text from a different origin and what is a novel generation.

user43928 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I am wondering how that applies to newly generated code.

Odd variable naming? Stylistic choices that are watermarked?

Or as someone else noted further down in the comments, it could be more subtle:

Between the first and second most likely choice, in certain positions it will consistently choose in a certain way.

melvinroest 37 minutes ago | parent [-]

> Odd variable naming? Stylistic choices that are watermarked?

Whatever it is, I'm sure it's load-bearing.

asdfsa32 28 minutes ago | parent [-]

You're absolutely right. But it is not just load-bearing, it is the load-bearing seams.

sixtyj 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It was quick :) … https://claudewatermarkremover.app/

shinryuu an hour ago | parent [-]

Though if pangram should be trusted, there are still statistical artifacts that tells you that a text LLM generated. I don't find that to be implausible.

akozak 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Most likely this method https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.10226 (EDIT: and Google's SynthID paper which builds on it https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08025-4)

hannasanarion 10 hours ago | parent [-]

That "just add a constant to the green logits" as a fix to the entropy problem is so elegant I love it.

baq 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I'd like to know a lot more about how that works.

Count load-bearing words using two different algorithms in a belt-and-braces fashion

r_lee 38 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

One thing worth flagging: those words are load-bearing

Razengan 25 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You’re absolutely right. Yo momma is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Her load-bearing methods have the right shape.

jbs789 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Fair - I should have been honest about the watermark.

seamlessdev 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Belt, braces, and suspenders.

isoprophlex an hour ago | parent [-]

Don't forget the suppositories

quintu5 10 minutes ago | parent [-]

This is why I never use max effort! I’ll stick with my suspenders, thank you.

dd8601fn 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That’s the real shape of the problem.

w_for_wumbo 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What happens if someone handwrites a Claude output, then someone uses that handwritten text as a reference. Now you've got a watermarked idea which may have no direct linkage to the usage of Claude.

dns_snek 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Are you worried about being accused of using LLMs to generate your work? As long as you don't plagiarize you have nothing to worry about.

platinumrad 7 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

You can't make a blanket statement like this without knowing how the watermark is implemented.

Cthulhu_ an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm not too sure about that, people making stuff have already gotten penalized by overzealous AI detectors, most recently Kurtzgesagt.

AlecSchueler an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

What if I unknowingly read content written by Claude in various articles and it influences my own writing style?

phainopepla2 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How is that different from referencing digital text that someone copied and pasted from Claude?

w_for_wumbo 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Because there's an expectation of authenticity from the written word. If you've referenced something handwritten, you don't expect it to be the output of an LLM.

Similarly, if you quote someone word-for-word, you wouldn't anticipate their words to be flagged as Claude content, but if someone memorized Claude output word-for-word. That would still be classified as a Claude output.

Going forward you could categorize the influence of Claude on a population based off a percentage match between their spoken words with the LLM prose.

miohtama 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Maybe there is a reason why Opus 5 produces such word salad conversations

stabbles 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It will just thread some load-bearing seams through the paragraphs.

mihaelm 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> have some kind of weird pattern baked into their text to act as a watermark.

public abstract class BaseAnimalBeanFactoryGeneratedFromClaudeFactory

gajus 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Most likely watermark will be proportional to the input/output ratio, i.e. if you input a long document and ask to make edits, it will not attempt to watermark it. On the other hand, if you provide a tweet and ask it to write an article, that will include watermark. Just a guess (and yes, it feels flawed)

nprateem 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Load-bearing==claude

siva7 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I can tell you how: Claude produces a huge wall of text with jargon ridden bullshit and invented terms no human subject matter expert would seriously use and overuse.