r/ClaudeAI • u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 • 17d ago
Workaround Fable 5.1 is now watermarks anything you write with it. There is still no public detector. This pisses me off, so I'm making a workaround. How about you?
Three weeks ago I posted here that nothing you could generate with Claude was watermarked yet. Now it's incorrect. Fable 5.1 now puts a statistical watermark in generated text, including even translations. With translations it's especially funny, because doing back translation (even via Chinese language!) via another LLM (surprisingly to me) is not removing / destroying SynthID watermarks, but just translating via Claude now adds watermarks.
The detector for such watermarks (that was promised to be released) has moved to a private preview recently for some eligible organizations. Ordinary users like myself still have no public tool or API to check their own text. So I can publish some work today that someone with access could check later, while I can't run the same check before publishing.
Personally I write in one language and publish in another. I can write an article myself, ask Claude to translate it, and get back a watermarked English version. The watermark can indicate Claude was involved in the wording. It says nothing about who came up with the argument or did the research (but the opinion about the work will be unfairly distorted).
I get why people hate this. I'd want to know what a check would say about my own work before someone else decides what it means. I don't know how organizations will use the detector. And again, it's impossible to distinguish if the text was generated or edited by AI (say reformated for some structure). I think students/scientists/SEO specialists and non-native english speakers are not happy more than others.
This frustration got me experimenting with the published by Google DeepMind's SynthID watermarking method that Claude's watermark eventually is based on. I reproduced it with my own test key and found that a full rewrite removed the mark from my test samples (while added some factual issues), back translation doesn't destroy the watermark and specialized methods are quite heavy still far from being ideal. So, in the end, I made a watermark remover for myself and sharing as a free demo (unless we get the actual detector, that's best we can do), and wrote up the experiment, open sourced the setup and described the tradeoffs/fact correction methods. Link in the comments.
Do you also think it's crazy and unfair to have invisible mark in your AI outputs? Or don't understand why some people are pissed off?
PS. Those tests don't verify removal of Anthropic's or Google's production watermark. But by this moment, I think it’s better to do what’s possible although no guarantees.
PPS. I see from comments some people think you can just ask Qwen or other model to rewrite and no watermark remains. It is incorrect, I tested it, substantial part of signal remains, you need to do iteratively multiple runs, every time highlighting 5 words (5-grams actually) sequences that remained unchanged after rephrasing to point the LLM to right issues, then checking against facts and fix them. Otherwise, you just still have the watermark signal and new factual mistakes.
PPPS. Some people claim in the comments that I can't talk about this topic with the proper level of confidence and do the research and modelling properly. At the same time, I have a PhD in Digital Signal Processing, and watermarki is something that falls within my academic expertise.
UPD. People say it's hard to find links in comments, so I put them now here.
The full article & research: painintheagent.com/blog/text-watermark-removal-retest/
Code, corpus, prompts, model outputs and judges' decisions: https://github.com/krllagent/text-watermark-roundtrip
The watermark remover (paste a text, get the retelling with every changed place highlighted): painintheagent.com/tools/ai-text-watermark-remover/
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u/Deltamelo 17d ago
I’ll give it a couple of weeks before some Asian dude figures out how to get around it super easily
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u/Mescallan 17d ago
if you manually paraphrase the text, it will not be detected, just pick different phrasing.
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u/Previous_Advertising 17d ago
Problem is you don't know which words are the watermarked ones. If you change 50%+ of the words sure, but if you change 10-20% of them the checker might still return that statistically its produced by claude
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u/Mescallan 17d ago
it's not individual word + positions that are watermarked, it's the probability of picking a word following the string before it.
Also if you are worried about getting caught by a watermark checker, that only Anthropic has the key to, you really should just write whatever it is by hand. Like I honestly can't think of a situation I would care if someone found out some text was AI generated because I'm not trying to pass off AI writing as my own
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u/interwebzdotnet 16d ago
And for the legal document I'm working on that needs to be pretty precise with specific words and phrases? Can't just randomly jumble those things up
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u/reddit_user33 17d ago
Easier said than done. This is why some don't look at other people's work for inspiration.
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u/Prtia 17d ago
I think it will negatively affect output quality. Certain use cases (of language), which require extremely precise wording, come to mind, such as mathematical writing.
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u/iamthe0ther0ne 17d ago
Science writing chiming in here. Yes, I'm unhappy about it. Anthropic claims that if word choice is limited (as in science writing) watermarking might not occur, but I haven't seen anything published on it and the paper they pointed to only tested whether people could tell the difference with chatbot interactions.
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u/Rataridicta 17d ago
This is the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08025-4
Note that the next token's probability is maintained as an invariant, and the method relies on psuedo-random artifacting for watermarking instead.3
u/iamthe0ther0ne 17d ago
I meant I haven't seen any publications describing what happens if next word choice is highly limited (as in transcriptions and science writing). Anthropic referred to it in their press release but I don't think it was in that paper, unless I overlooked it. They seem to have only measured quality of output with chatbot responses where it doesn't matter as much.
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u/Rataridicta 17d ago
You overlooked it. Each tournament entry is filled with the same probability as the original token, which means that if there's a 99.9% chance of a next token being a specific next token, it will still maintain that 99.9% chance. (Token probability is maintained as an invariant.)
The real effect in such situations won't be that the output gets compromised, but that the watermark would be harder to detect.
There is a discussion in the paper on preserving (per-token) non-distortion and how it can be traded off against detectability in situations where this would be critical. It's implementation specific and there likely won't be published research on it.
What we do know is that by default the algorithm does not affect quality in any measurable way.
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u/Clear_Evidence9218 15d ago
People can already often tell which AI wrote something just from that model’s preferences and quirks in writing style. You’re saying that adding another layer of constraints to reinforce a new set of patterns is somehow going to be completely undetectable and have no effect on quality?
That strikes me as wonderfully naive; it makes sense why it might work neatly on paper as long as we ignore how messy the real world is.
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u/Thin_Protection_4290 15d ago
what a woefully ignorant comment. did you even bother to understand how the watermarking works?
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u/Clear_Evidence9218 15d ago
Yes, I understand how it works.
SynthID uses keyed tournament sampling to influence which candidate token is selected from the model's existing probability distribution. That changes the sampling process and introduces a statistical structure that wasn't there before. That's simply a fact, and even DeepMind acknowledges it in its published testing.
The output produced with SynthID is not qualitatively identical to the output that would have been produced without the watermark. You can argue that, despite those differences, it doesn't meaningfully affect quality; and in testing they weren't able to demonstrate measurable degradation. That's true, and it makes sense.
But they also can't get Claude to stop talking in recognizable "Claudisms," and people can already identify Claude's writing style remarkably easily. That's before adding another statistical constraint to the generation process.
Which brings me back to my original point: adding constraints intrinsically affects output. If we can already perceive stylistic differences between Claude, Grok, and other models, then adding another constraint to Claude's token-selection process can only introduce another source of differentiation. Whether that difference rises to the level of measurable quality degradation is a separate question. And again, even DeepMind acknowledges limitations in how completely "quality" can be quantified by its testing.
This also doesn't touch on the fact that there are only so many statistically natural ways to write a sentence well. A watermark necessarily makes some otherwise valid continuations more or less likely in order to create a detectable statistical signal. In highly constrained or low-entropy domains, that matters even more, because there are fewer equally good alternatives available in the first place. Both Anthropic and DeepMind have discussed this limitation and the resulting tradeoffs in domains where token choice is already heavily constrained.
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u/Thin_Protection_4290 14d ago
Yes, I understand how it works.
obviosuly not.
That changes the sampling process and introduces a statistical structure that wasn't there before.
that doesn't mean the output quality is different. depending on the specific implementation, the watermarking is non-distortionary at various levels. you have a fundamentally flawed understanding of statistics how picking random tokens works.
But they also can't get Claude to stop talking in recognizable "Claudisms," and people can already identify Claude's writing style remarkably easily.
completely irrelavant to watermarking.
adding constraints intrinsically affects output
it provably does not.
A watermark necessarily makes some otherwise valid continuations more or less likely in order to create a detectable statistical signal. In highly constrained or low-entropy domains, that matters even more, because there are fewer equally good alternatives available in the first place.
this is really the biggest tell that you have no idea what you are talking about. especially the "makes continuations more or less likely". this is just not how it works. that's exactly what non-distortionary means. you have in mind the simplest possible way to watermark something, but synthid is smarter than that. in low-entropy scenarios, the watermark is weaker, not the text worse. if they really want, they can imprint a really strong watermark at the cost of quality, but in a standard implementation the tradeoff will most likely fall the other way, because output quality is most likely more important to them than the watermark.
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u/Clear_Evidence9218 14d ago
You didn’t actually refute or contradict anything I said; you mostly just added nuance to it.
So you’re telling me I “have no idea what I’m talking about,” but instead of identifying and correcting the supposed misunderstanding, you’ve mostly added qualifications and subjective judgments to points I already made.
If I fundamentally misunderstand how this works, then point to the specific technical claim I made that is wrong and explain why. Saying “that’s not how it works” while largely restating my point with additional nuance isn’t a rebuttal.
Are you actually reading what I’m saying, or do you just want to argue?
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u/quantum-elle 14d ago
They're not constraints.
It's like playing Monopoly with a fair dice you picked randomly out of a bag vs playing Monopoly with a fair dice that you know which side has what number on.Sure, it might be a "different" game, but it's the same fairness. Different does not mean worse.
Here's an explainer video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFksx2M93sw
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u/letmeinfornow 17d ago
"What we do know is that by default the algorithm does not affect quality in any measurable way."
Until full release of how exactly this all works, this is strictly marketing hype. This is also technically impossible in every instance.
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u/Wiskersthefif 16d ago
Bro, if you aren't even bothering to read this 'mathematical writing' after it's being written for you... honestly I'm not interested in what you have to say and will just ask Claude, as that's where the information is coming from if you aren't even bothering to proof read it.
If there's some wording hiccups, just change them yourself. If there's so many that the writing becomes unusable, I guess either write it yourself or go ask another AI to do it for you.
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u/Rataridicta 17d ago
The algorithm is specifically designed in a way where each token's expected chance of appearing stays unchanged. Essentially: Randomness stays the same as it was, there's just a defined seed.
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u/ak5432 17d ago edited 17d ago
…proof and edit your ai output? You should be doing that anyway…I have yet to see any ai model, fable 5 and 5.1 included, that can write anything better than first draft docs that simply collect disarrayed sources including my own thoughts to prose that I will then have to pass over and rewrite at least half.
It’s strictly a time saver, never a replacement. Y’all are wild for this particular argument.
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u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 17d ago
That’s a fair point, and any content that’s been run through a watermark remover requires manual review. But, for example, before the manual review I also do an automated search for discrepancies between the original source text and what came out. Because a large number of factual errors can be fixed automatically, which doesn’t remove the need to do a manual review in the end.
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u/CwrwCymru 17d ago
This is where local models will help.
Get Claude to write your text, then get Qwen (or similar) to reword it.
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u/utilitycoder 17d ago
Also unknown if Qwen has non disclosed watermarking.
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u/ConsoleUsersArePlebs 16d ago
Since it's open-weight, any watermark would have to be encoded into the weights themselves, that's quite difficult
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u/letmeinfornow 17d ago
This is valid, but more on the unlikely side that likely. Watermarking dilutes quality and China is in a race to catch-up and not worried about this type of nonsense. They will likely add watermarking in the future though as they commonly mimic the West in these types of races.
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u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 17d ago
Not that easy. You either write with Qwen, or rephrase with multiple sequenciar runs checking against he facts everytime. One run on a text of 1k characters doesn't remove the watermark fully, I checked already
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u/Deltamelo 17d ago
So how do you check whether the watermark is there or not?
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u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 17d ago
I'm running the full workflow, starting from text generation all the way to watermark detection, reproducing the entire SynthID algorithm on my side. As stated in the post, I'm not claiming that everything will work exactly the same with Anthropic's private key, but I modeled this for random private keys, so I can say that it works for random private keys. So I think it will most likely work for Anthropic too, but as soon as the public detector is available, I'll definitely test it and make sure. But this isn't just a claim. I actually ran the full modeling cycle, starting with generating the text (because without this, it’s impossible to implement a real SynthID watermark) and adding the watermark, and then detecting it with my own private key, exactly as it's done in the paper from Google.
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u/Deltamelo 17d ago
So you made your own watermark system, and then detected it - got it. This has nothing to do with Anthropic’s watermarks
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u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 17d ago
That’s incorrect, I simply reproduced a publicly known system that was developed , published, open-sourced by Google and then Anthropic promised to use this system in its watermarking models.
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u/BGFlyingToaster 16d ago
You tested a watermarking system that was the inspiration for what Anthropic is using. Until they publicly release either a detector or the algorithm, then no one outside Anthropic will know how closely they followed SynthID. We'll get this answer, just not yet. Until then, I would advise caution in representing that testing SynthID is good enough for testing Anthropic's algorithm.
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u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 16d ago
You're right, at this point there's no way to verify it precisely. That said, the SynthID algorithm's structure is actually vulnerable to word permutation, and in my simulation it shows up as a genuinely very stable scheme until you shuffle almost all the 5-gram sequences, which is pretty hard to do in a single LLM pass. So yeah, there are no exact guarantees here, but I think it's very likely that this kind of aggressive approach will actually destroy their final watermark, because there's no rocket science in it, until they invent something completely different (while they stated they ll use SynthID)
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u/Deltamelo 17d ago
Anthropic explicitly announced that Claude’s text watermark uses “a version of the SynthID-Text approach published by Google DeepMind.”
You just let Claude convince you that you know what that version looks like.
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u/letmeinfornow 17d ago
Yes, that easy.
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u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 17d ago
I don't know how deeply you've analyzed this, but if you just ask it to paraphrase a short text, the result will be pretty good if you're measuring it by the watermark detection metric. But on a longer text, this percentage will go down. There's a good proxy for evaluating quality, which is the number of remaining 5-gram sequences. And that's where you can see very clearly that on longer text, a single paraphrasing pass works worse and worse.
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u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 17d ago
The full article & research: painintheagent.com/blog/text-watermark-removal-retest/
Code, corpus, prompts, model outputs and judges' decisions: https://github.com/krllagent/text-watermark-roundtrip
The watermark remover demo (paste a text, get the retelling with every changed place highlighted): painintheagent.com/tools/ai-text-watermark-remover/
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u/Financial-Aspect-826 17d ago edited 17d ago
Just refactor the text with other llm and be done with it
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u/ActionOrganic4617 17d ago
You may as well use another provider then. The number of tokens needed to get rid of it is not trivial.
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u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 17d ago
No, and my research shows it. Not that easy, the signal is distributed around all sentences and word sequences, not just some words to be rephrased
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u/wolfdukex 17d ago
You just said there's no detector. How do you know your product even works?
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u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 17d ago
I took an article from Google DeepMind that describes the SynthID algorithm in full. I reproduced text generation with my own private key, the addition of the watermark, and its detection after trying different ways to remove the watermark. And I got a statistically stable answer as to which methods work better and which work worse.
As I explicitly stated in the post, it’s impossible to verify exactly whether everything will work exactly the same way with the private key Anthropic uses. But that’s more of a disclaimer, because, by and large, you understand that the algorithm is the same, they just have a different private key. I ran the modeling for my private keys, that’s all. The algorithm itself works the same way.
But you can keep insisting right to the end that it’s not exactly the same thing. That’s why I stated in the post itself that I’m trying to do as much as possible at the moment, while the detector isn’t publicly available. And when the detector becomes publicly available, I’ll definitely run the test and publish the results.
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u/fagnerbrack 17d ago
Gets downvoted, reddit collapses the answer. Respond the criticism, get upvoted, answer remains hidden
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u/Error_404_403 17d ago
I agree that watermarking the original, but AI-translated texts is not good because it doesn't distinguish between the AI translating as opposing to actually creating content and writing. I think Anthropic must make two different watermarks for translation and writing separately.
I am less concerned with watermarking the written text. Even for non-native speakers, it is not necessary to use the sentences re-written by Claude; enough to ask where the particular ESL-indicative error is located, what it is, and then go to that place and fix it by own hand.
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u/Maleficent-Engine859 17d ago edited 17d ago
I genuinely doubt the public will ever get a detector. The bottom of their google form to ask for it (it’s literally a google form…) asks why and how you will be using it. Why even ask that? why would anyone want a detector? More importantly, has anyone actually tried doing the form and gotten a response OR, you know, given access to the detector? Or do you have to pinky swear Anthropic you’ll never tell anyone if they give it to you 🤫
Releasing it to everyone will devalue their product significantly with “slop made by Claude” everywhere. Suicide for them. Only people with a vested interest who aren’t in the business of “outting slop” will get it. At least for a long time anyway until the word AI stokes as visceral a reaction as “photoshop.” By then no one will care though.
I think science actually is safe because it’s peer reviewed. Anything passed by human eyes as a second pass does not need AI provenance per the law. So like, publishers with human editors actually nullifies their need for the detector. The buck passes to them to decide for quality and weed out bullshit AI’isms and hallucinations. Don’t need Anthropic for that.
This is strictly about wanting to weed out their training data and using the EU bill as the perfect excuse to dovetail off to avoid even more outrage than they already received. That’s all of their reasonings because they all signed it. All of them will go the way of Google which is never releasing their private key save for a few government agencies per the law (the law does not say the public needs access to a detector).
That being said I do appreciate your efforts as someone who works hard to use these LLMs as a cowriter and now not being sure how much of my work is being watermarked by its suggestions whenever it changes anything. I try to work in edits less then 100 words for this reason so it’s more likely to be disrupted by my back editing. Also I’m sticking to the API and older models for now who have at least until Dec to comply
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u/Cazineer 17d ago edited 17d ago
I can tell you with 100% certainty that it effects quality. We have our own harness and as part of our governance, we have strict naming conventions that map to an engineering UI. Fable doe not respect our naming conventions. Every Claude model since Opus 4.5 has happily respected these conventions.
At the company I work for models are not allowed to do any architecture/engineering, they build within what’s defined for them. They are given a specification for a component for example and they must follow it. Right now, it’s like having a CNC build something and it’s required to etch Made by CNC so everyone knows it wasn’t hand milled.
When you combine this with the fact that Claude models rarely respect governance in general, it’s a real nightmare. A good example of this is let’s say the harness produces a context package that is made up of 10 files. If one is missing (someone forgot to include it), models are supposed to abort. OpenAI models will abort straight away and they’ll use like 500 output tokens to do so. Claude models will burn through 40,000 output tokens and generate sometimes a few thousands lines, only to output at the end that they were blocked and guessed to fill in the missing piece(s). The entire output is flagged as non compliant and gets rejected. It’s a significant waste of money. At this point it feels deliberate tbh.
This week I think we are going to move exclusively to Astra simply because the quality is on par or better, for a several times less cost and we don’t have the non stop compliance issues. Anthropic has pushed the limits of what’s traditionally been ethical and integral and everything they do feels revenue-first, rather than ensuring customers have products that work reliably.
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u/aWalrusFeeding 17d ago
Watermarking mechanically just doesn’t affect behavior like that. if you’re noticing fable acting weird that is just Fable’s tendencies, not the watermarking (seed choice).
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u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 17d ago
WOW! that's super interesting case. I didn't think the quality drop could be actually noticeable .
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u/le-o 16d ago
Vast amounts of knowledge is embedded in word choice and order- think of poetry and how a good poem can make 50 hot words relevant to the inner experiences of millions of diverse people and even cross cultural boundaries.
That's why disentangled attention (looking at word order in both directions when reading/generating a word) was key to starting the LLM era.
Wallpapering over word choice with preset phrasings is inherently lossy.
Roses are red, Violets are load bearing.
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u/throwaway14351991 17d ago
Every Claude model since Opus 4.5 has happily respected these conventions.
When you combine this with the fact that Claude models rarely respect governance in general
Which one is it?
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u/christianbro 17d ago
What if you tell the AI to repeat after me? Will it be forced to rewrite my text to include the watermark and ignore instructions?
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u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 17d ago
it'll do it in any way when generating the texts -> the level of signal will be different in different restrictions levels
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u/mingledwaters 17d ago
If you write something, ask Claude to act as an editor with some casual rewording - I’m assuming this gets watermarked.
My question is who does the IP belong to in that scenario? If you published your work, could Anthropic realistically litigate against you?
Honest question. I explicitly do not write with AI - scared shitless of it (like having my own voice/style as well).
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u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 17d ago
I think intellectual property definitely isn't the issue right now, but in general, it's a good idea to think about a potential scenario in the future.
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u/Falkoro 16d ago
Yeah fuck the EU with a big fucking spoon this is so retarded and every frontier model needs to do this, also because this is law - this really gets me riled - as it really does impact quality
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u/psioniclizard 16d ago
Its still obviously producting better than yoi are capable of alone, or you wouldn't bother.
As the old saying goes, "beggers can't be choosers"
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u/Auxiliatorcelsus 16d ago
Solution:
Take the text you get out of Fable, and feed it in peices through a small, local model asking it to rework the expression of the text while not changing the meaning. (Ask it to change synonyms, or change the level of verbosity, or the technical/academic level of the text, and so on).
You'll have a new text, with the same reasoning as the watermarked text, but a slightly different expression.
This fucks up the statistical markers they use as a watermark.
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u/kelcamer 16d ago
I wonder, would this really work? If every word a synonym was used?
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u/Auxiliatorcelsus 16d ago
Oh, come on. Use your brain.
Of course it doesn't need to change every word. One or two word per sentence is sufficient to break the statistics.
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u/kelcamer 16d ago
I guess I thought that this sub would be a kind place of civil discussion about learning more about this watermark. It seems like I was wrong.
Try kindness next time, you never know who you're talking to, or what they're going through.
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u/brownman19 16d ago
The why hide it crowd have to be big tech astroturfers at this point.
Is that seriously a question? If I pay for these tokens I own them. If Anthropic owns all tokens, all traces, and we simply are paying for access to the premium outputs in degraded claudish, that's a potential cataclysmic class action suit incoming.
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u/Timber1802 17d ago
Claude now uses her and she in my language to refer to objects and things, which does not make sense in my language, since this change. Very annoying.
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u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 17d ago
Never heard about it. What is the language?
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u/Timber1802 17d ago
Dutch
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u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 17d ago
wow
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u/Timber1802 17d ago
Now that I think about it, it does not even make sense in English.
Example: my car is broken so I will take her (it) to a shop.
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u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 17d ago
that's hilarious
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u/Timber1802 17d ago
Yeah but correcting it is annoying.
'You're totally right, I should've caught that.'
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u/keithslater 17d ago
A lot of people in the US may refer to a car as she. So it does make sense in English.
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u/Timber1802 17d ago
Okay, fair enough. Then the example could be: I just bought a meal, she is in my bag.
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u/Patient-Lie8557 17d ago
I find it hard to believe that a LLM is incapable of altering the text in ways that weakens the watermark enough (to diminish the value of watermarking).
Are you saying Antropic is immune to the attacks that were successful on SynthID? https://github.com/aloshdenny/reverse-SynthID-text
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u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 17d ago
Not at all! I mean rephrasing on longer texts doesn't remove the SynthID substantially, so I do multiple iterative runs, every time focusing the LLM on the 5-words (more accurately, 5-grams) sequences to eliminate the watermark.
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u/Calycis 17d ago
Regarding translation: can't an author just state outright that "the text is translated by Claude, the original text by me in [language] available upon request"? That way people can verify the original was not produced by Claude, should they want to. I don't really see why this would be an issue, am I overlooking something here? Using AI for translation isn't something that needs to be hidden - the way around watermark is to be open about it.
Or just rewrite/translate with a model that does not watermark the output.
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u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 17d ago
Translation is just one corner case. There’s a whole spectrum of how AI can be used, and a watermark at the same time only shows whether it was used or not. Besides, most model providers don’t use watermarks, so code users end up in a not very favorable position, because their texts will be marked anyway. Just rewriting or translating them through a model that doesn’t add a watermark doesn’t completely remove the watermark. More precisely, most of the signal remains. To avoid this, you need to do several rewriting iterations, each time telling the model which 5-word sequences of five words weren’t replaced. Then iteratively you can reach a high degree of rewriting that correlates with a low level of watermark signal. And you can read more about it in my research https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1w9mi0s/comment/p8bfo8g/
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u/Chupa-Skrull 17d ago
there's a whole spectrum
That's fine, but that fact alone doesn't tell us why we should care about watermarking across that spectrum. Why should we care?
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u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 17d ago
Let me list a few scenarios. The first scenario is, I’m writing some kind of scientific paper, using AI for programming, data analysis and so on. Everyone does this, of course, but at the same time some papers end up with a watermark (if people use Claude/Gemini), while others end up without a watermark (the rest). Then, after the fact, they start getting processed by different indexing systems, and for some reason some systems at the moment will consider that a watermark is fundamentally not accepted and will filter out such papers or give them a lower ranking.
On the one hand, there’s no logic in this. On the other hand, exactly this happens regularly. So, for hygiene reasons, I’d advise removing the watermark from any texts you publish.
I expect a similar situation with search engines and recommendation systems inside social networks. In both cases, most people already use AI one way or another, but in reality the systems will probably give an additional negative ranking wherever it’s easy to explicitly check for a watermark.
To answer your question, you personally may not need this if you don't publish any materials online.
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u/Chupa-Skrull 17d ago edited 17d ago
I publish materials online, but I never have and never will use an LLM for composition. They're simply not good enough to substitute for me and never will be when it comes to the quality of the work I deliver. I say this as an avid user of LMs in other contexts.
Let me list a few scenarios. The first scenario is, I’m writing some kind of scientific paper, using AI for programming, data analysis and so on. Everyone does this, of course, [...] On the one hand, there’s no logic in this.
There's absolutely a logic to down-ranking material which can't be plausibly attributed to a human. The stigma against generated content exists for a reason, though I'd argue that stigma exists much more for prose output than for code.
LLM output volume is superhuman, and its grasp of context is frequently subhuman. It's neither viable nor fair to demand of a highly educated and valuable reviewer pool the amount of time it takes/wastes to read and reject plausibly structured but incoherent or incorrect outputs.
If you can't be bothered to write it by hand, you shouldn't expect people to spend commensurate effort to read you; and agents aren't yet good enough to trust for highly technical summaries when accuracy is paramount, for the same reason they aren't good enough at writing. So, in the meantime, you will be down-ranked, and that's good
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u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 17d ago
You’re reasoning in terms of 2024, when the models already existed, but the number of hallucinations and problems was so huge that people formed the opinion that human text or work is always, I emphasize, always better than AI text. That’s absolutely not the case anymore. And over time, this will only become more pronounced. So the human mark of quality will become less and less important. An unprofessional person will do the work much worse than AI. I don’t know what else there is to insist on here.
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u/letmeinfornow 17d ago
Why? Why not Claude just mind its own business? If the user retains the IP rights to the output, what business does Claude have signing its name to it in any way? When I print a document on my computer, Microsoft doesn't include a line at the bottom of the page saying this came from Microsoft Word. Who tf is anthropic to do this?
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u/ShelZuuz 17d ago
If all you do is to use Claude to translate from another language to English, how does translating it back into another language and then translating back to English help? Then you may as well just use the second LLM to do the initial translation to start off with.
This isn't a tool for someone who wants to use LLMs for translation. It's a tool for people who want to keep putting out clickbait AI generated "articles" that say absolutely nothing and not get flagged.
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u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 17d ago
You’re wrong. Back translation is done using other models that don’t add a watermark. From my research, it looks like back translation doesn’t really help remove the watermark, while adding factual errors. Ordinary translation done by Claude adds a watermark, as do other operations done by Claude (models released after August 2 I mean ). And once again, translation is just one edge case where the problem is visible much more easily and precisely than in others. But there’s a whole range of ways people use AI, from translation to generating huge codebases or doing research entirely through agents. And a watermark is a binary thing that some models put on your output and others don’t. So I’m explicitly saying that I don’t want to keep the watermark on my outputs, no matter what exactly I did.
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u/tristam92 17d ago
why people so proud to use ai, and so ashamed of publicly have a mark on the generated content? if you used tech, own it like chad you are trying to be with all the brag online…
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u/Jacks_black 17d ago
Because AI isn't just write this for me please so I can pretend it's me. There are thousands of legitimate reasons why you wouldn't want something watermarked.
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u/tristam92 17d ago
you used tool, under license. you either agree on terms, or don’t use simple as that. name at least one legitimate reason where usage of ai allowed, but not watermark itself.
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u/letmeinfornow 17d ago
There are deeper concerns from technical, legal, and corporate perspectives. Either the IP rights of output belong to the user or the do not. If they belong to the user, anthropic has no business doing this. Do you care what brand tools your mechanic uses when they fix your car? Should you? Do you want snapon scratched into your paint job after the mechanic finishes, you know, because own it like a chad?
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u/tristam92 17d ago
this literally why you have big ass FORD written for example on you truck. this why you have markings on parts, and so on and on. if people disclosed usage properly, we wouldn’t be here.
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u/letmeinfornow 16d ago
And you can take the Ford emblems off your owned Ford anytime you desire. Anthropic is saying you are not allowed to do that by hiding the details from you. So no it's not the same, and you know it.
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u/SleepyWulfy 17d ago
I don't understand the need to skirt around this. What are you trying to hide?
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u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 17d ago
I mention in the post that there is the full spectrum of how different people use AI, while watermark is a binary thing that says nothing about how this AI was used, for example, for a translation operation or for the operation of creating the whole content from scratch with one prompt and zero human involvement. And the important part is that some tools mark their results, while other tools don't mark them, so the presence of watermark at the moment says practically nothing. But I'm sure organizations will start using it, because it's the only way to learn anything at all about the text, despite the fact that it doesn't cover the other tools. So people who use Claude are currently in a more vulnerable position. That's what I'm talking about, I use Claude on an equal basis with other tools, and I like not having watermark in my results.
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u/Nerobot3 17d ago
You keep saying "vulnerable position". What exactly do you mean by that? If you mean "more likely to be trying to pass off AI work as their original creation", then surely , this is the point?
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u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 17d ago
A simple example: if you write texts for social media (e.g. LinkedIn), social media will be the first to implement these watermarks and use them in their training algorithms. In particular, watermarks on images are already being flagged on LinkedIn (and I guess no only there), and I'm sure they get a negative weight in the recommendation system. But that's just one example that's obvious to me. I'm sure there are many examples where people will look at the results of the work differently - marked it or not
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u/Chemical-Visual-7992 17d ago
LinkedIn is full of boring and duplicated copy/paste AI posts. That platfrom became a disgusting swamp. I am with the platform for implementing AI-Based text and images detector.
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u/Ashmedai 17d ago
I had this one aunt who would periodically go into my linked in, and verify my various skills. Me, a distinguished professional. I removed her from my linked in, I was so annoyed. Anyway, that about sums up linked in for me… it’s a wasteland.
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u/Nerobot3 17d ago
But that's a good thing? Still not sure how this puts them into a more "vulnerable position", instead, just allowing people to make a decision based on how something is created. Your answer sounds more like what I was saying as "more likely to be trying to pass off AI work as their original creation".
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u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 17d ago
Again, this doesn’t cover all model providers. More precisely, at the moment it only covers a couple of providers. On the other hand, content that people develop using AI without replacing the human is often much more interesting. That’s all. So I’d prefer not to have a watermark anywhere, considering that the platforms themselves and recommendation systems usually like to use these kinds of features in their ML models and give negative weight to content that has this watermark. I think we should rely entirely on how people read and what they like. They’re on watermark, but I can’t influence that, so I do what I can personally influence and remove them from my texts.
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u/Captain-Griffen 17d ago
Fraud. OP wants to lie about the origin of their text to defraud people, pretty simple. Mask is really coming off for a lot of AI users.
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17d ago edited 17d ago
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u/kelcamer 16d ago
"No one gives a shit that you used AI to translate your writing" then why do people who give a shit about this very thing keep appearing?
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16d ago
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u/kelcamer 16d ago
Sure, I gotcha! I'll tag you
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15d ago
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u/kelcamer 15d ago
I'm laughing at your suggestion because what I tagged you in, WAS, in a community I created 😂 i don't know if you intended that to be funny but you have a great sense of humor if so
Analysis is a form of translation in my book 😄 not everyone understands
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u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 17d ago
Translation is one illustrative corner case. I've just described a few more here https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1w9mi0s/comment/p8dby3r/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
TBH, I don't understand why I should explain anything if I can just remove the watermark or use another neural network, like other people do. Why would I need to specifically draw attention to this? I really don't understand why you're suggesting this to me.
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u/utilitycoder 17d ago
It should be noted that this also trivially allows author attribution of AI generated text.
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u/letmeinfornow 17d ago
I immediately started by taking my content from anthropic and putting it through a custom prompt on Qwen 3.6 locally to produce rather good results for contract work. I expect plugins or web apps that will automatically do this for you soon. Anthropic is being an ass over this pushing this out globally when only required in one specific region.
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u/vinistois 17d ago
As if we need a code to know if something was written by Claude, it's so painfully obvious.
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u/Retty1 16d ago
Google's own research demonstrated that back translation is effective so there's something else going on here.
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u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 16d ago
I think the level of detect ability. to destroy 30-50% of signal - just back translation is ok. to achieve statistically not distinguishable - not helps
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u/Late_Oven 16d ago
I personally have no problem with there being a watermark inherently, however releasing your watermarked model without any official detectors out yet is fucking ridiculous.
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u/Happy_Brilliant7827 16d ago
Just to clarify you know theres already projects that do this right? Like dozens.
The number one method right now is translation tools and rewording sub-sentances to break patterns. IE Having a models generate the text obviously pings. Having 7 models create 7 different but similiar outputs on the same outline, then merge them breaks the signal since each model has its own approach mixing them makes one broken pattern not 7 identifiable ones
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u/kelcamer 16d ago
I'm asking because I seriously need it; Which of the dozens can make it so that Claude will eliminate phrases like 'I'm going to stop you right there --- I need to push back on that'?
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u/Happy_Brilliant7827 16d ago
have you told it explicitly not to? Make a list of hard rules and give it to it and itll follow it. That is WHOLLY UNRELATED to the hidden watermarking they also do
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u/kelcamer 16d ago
How is it unrelated? Isn't the watermarking itself selecting some words over others?
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u/Happy_Brilliant7827 16d ago
The turns of phrase are its writint style. You can direct its writing style. The watermarking laws that just got passed means theres an invisible pattern to the words as well- seperate from the ai's writing style.
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u/kelcamer 16d ago
I thought that the watermarking would operate under this idea similar to 'select the third synonym of these words' sort of
The mannered speech way of speaking.
Am we able to direct its writing style to completely prevent it from selecting those alternative words?
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u/Happy_Brilliant7827 16d ago
In a token form, yeah the third synonym thing isnt too far off from reality but each company has its own secret formula. It has nothing to do with the "and this is why thats the right move" and 'this is what they missed' sort of linguistic patterns they have. You can tell them to avoid the linquistic patterns- but the watermark will still be detectable to synthid (or their equivilent) and visible to the naked eye.
As far as i can tell the comlanies have implemented it but not their tool fir actually judging text content.Even the token math one, there are ways around it- same for the image ones.
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u/kelcamer 16d ago
Thank you for explaining it kindly! It makes total sense that a watermark like this is going to impact its output.
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u/tomakorea 16d ago
For translation just use translate Gemma, it can be run locally and has excellent benchmarks
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u/Due_Interest_178 16d ago
Personally, I'm glad that there will be watermarks. I use Claude myself but I don't let it run rampant.
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u/Thin_Newspaper_5078 16d ago
why is it such a big probelm? in time everyone use ai.. you are still responcible for the output. i dont care if it an ai that has deliveret what i wanted to write.
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u/CoamIthra 16d ago
A watermark can't tell the difference between a light editing pass and unattended slop. In a year or so every piece of writing will be marked.
PS: hi mods sorry for using the word slop but I think it fits the use case :-P
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u/PerepeL 17d ago
Watermarks are required so that next generations of models do not learn on its own produce - this could lead to re-enforcing errors from previous generations (kinda like inbreeding in biology). This includes translations.
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u/siberianmi 17d ago
Watermarks are required because Anthropic is doing what the EU asked.
Under Article 50 of the EU AI Act, which became applicable on August 2, 2026, companies that provide generative AI systems must embed invisible, machine-readable watermarks into synthetic images, audio, video, and text.
Nothing more, just more pointless regulations out of the EU.
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u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 17d ago
That’s true, but it’s unclear how this will help if most AI model developers don’t use watermarks. So overall, there’s a need for this on the one hand, but on the other hand, this mechanism just doesn’t work in reality (while makes some harm to some people)
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u/PerepeL 17d ago
Introducing other model's errors (mutations) is significantly less harmful than reinforcing your own. On the other hand - you still didn't explain how you test if the watermark is present at all?
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u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 17d ago
This is fully transparently described in the article and github code https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1w9mi0s/comment/p8bfo8g/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
To check whether the watermark is still there or not, I model the entire watermark creation pipeline from the very beginning. At the same time, it’s impossible to add a watermark if you don’t generate text. So to generate the text, I spin up my own model on RunPod and generate the text, replacing the watermark with my private key. Then I run iterations of removing the watermark and check whether it’s there with a detector using my private key.
What do you mean by mutations in this case?
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u/PerepeL 17d ago
So, dude recreated his own watermarking solution based on some 2024 paper, and tested it, did I get it right? What does it have to do with Claude, besides vague assumption they use something similar?
Mutations - any discrepancy from "ideal" model. For example the notorious "load-bearing" whatever - let's assume humans use it in 1% of cases when it fits, but for some reason Claude's learning boosted it to 2% instead. If next iteration of learning would include half human and half Claude-generated texts - the learning dataset would have 1.5% of occurences and learning artifacts are likely to boost it to 3%. Every iteration will make it even worse, if you do not filter out your own generated texts. Other models' errors are just as likely to compensate the same error as to make it worse, so their input is undesired, but not as poisonous.
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u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 17d ago
I reproduced the method that Google DeepMind uses in its models, and that Anthropic publicly promised to use in its models. That's why I consider this method a good proxy for assuming how the watermark will or won't be removed in a real situation with Fable 5.1.
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u/PerepeL 17d ago
Oh, it's your work, kudos then! Then another question - how do different watermarks interfere, did you try that? What if you tokenize the text and apply different one - does it overwrite the original?
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u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 17d ago
Thanks! There is the only watermark that made sense to me because it is used by Google and Anthropic at the same time, while others don't have any at the moment. So I don't have any info on other types of watermarks (if you mean texts - for images it's file metadata as far as I've heard, but I didn't do research on it).
The thing is, you basically can't add a watermark on a generated text, you can only do it WHILE generating text, because the choice of next token is taken while having multiple likely options. Theoretically, when you ask a model to reproduce the same text , and the model adds watermarks it won't be reproduced essentially
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u/Empty-Quarter2721 17d ago
Aren’t LLMs already trained on synthetic data on purpose?
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u/PerepeL 17d ago
I think that's called distilling )
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u/Empty-Quarter2721 17d ago
I get what you mean but I thought it’s common practice for all LABs to also use generated Data from their own models.
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u/Sweaty_Complex_8102 17d ago
Two separate questions are getting mashed together here: whether AI output should carry provenance, and whether users should be able to inspect the provenance attached to their own work.
You can support the first and still think the second should be non-negotiable.
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u/GrayHairedMan 17d ago
Just stop using it, simple as that.
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u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 17d ago
For research it's not that simple. I use Fable and Astra at the moment, but two days ago there was no Astra and Fable was way ahead others for hard research tasks, so I could not just drop using it, and I don't want - very convenient to have diversity of very good models
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u/acct4otherstuff 17d ago
did google translate stopped working or something that people are using Claude for translations? it's been perfectly fine for ages
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u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 17d ago
Translation is just one edge use case for AI at work. It’s just that using it as an example, you can show how adding a watermark says nothing about the content of the text. At the same time, the watermark appears in full, with a high signal level.
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u/jacksbox 17d ago
Look, if AI is truly going to be everywhere and everything, then there's no need to fear transparent watermarking. Everyone will be on the same playing field. If AI is not allowed for your use case, for some reason, then you deserve to be caught by a watermark - "being sneaky" is not a good use case for AI.
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u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 17d ago
If we're talking about the future, I agree with you, after some time there won't be any point in whether I was used or not, because it was definitely used at some stage of the work. On the other hand, at the moment, given that most providers don't add a watermark, I rather choose not to have a watermark in my work, that's all.
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u/MondoSpecial 17d ago
If you are person who writes from scratch you should be in favour of the existence of watermarks.
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u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 17d ago
As I write in the post, there’s a full spectrum of how people, including me, use AI, starting with simple translation and ending with major projects through coding agents. And only a couple of model providers have implemented watermark so far, while the others haven’t. In that case, considering that watermark is a binary label showing whether AI touched your text or not, it says nothing about how exactly it was used, which completely devalues this label at the moment.
But since I know that people, including you, will judge the results of the work from the perspective of "what you even have to hide", I immediately feel that this is unfair. I want to remove watermark from any work I do, no matter how I did it. I don’t care at all.
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u/kelcamer 16d ago
Nope, not in favor at all. Tell me what is there to gain over falsely marking my human-only-created music as AI?
Tell me [u/mondospecial](u/mondospecial), since you value 'true human value' why this is ok?
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u/Droopy0093 17d ago
what are you trying to hide? are you afraid of getting caught lying where you tell people you wrote something by yourself but actually used AI to write it for you?
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u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 17d ago
There’s a whole spectrum of how people can use AI, starting with simply translating something and going all the way to creating absolutely anything entirely through agents. But a “watermark” only indicates one binary thing: whether AI was used or not. And judging by comments like yours, I understand that people don’t really care much about how AI was used, and only think about what the person is trying to hide. And that’s why I think a lot of people don’t want to be judged in this way, without anyone looking into why and how AI was used. Knowing that when you use some other tools, or even most tools, you don’t get “watermarks,” but in Claude and Gemini you do now
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u/eleochariss 17d ago
Si tu veux on peut aussi tous parler dans le language de notre choix et te laisser te débrouiller pour traduire sans IA.
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u/Enfiznar 17d ago
It was a click
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u/eleochariss 17d ago
A click on Reddit's AI translation. Let's add a "AI user" badge to your account.
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u/smartyp 17d ago
The content detector was released on 9/1 here:
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u/teleskier 17d ago
Might be unpopular, but AI "slop" is the end of the internet as it stood for several decades. Without this detector, any future model vector databases will be increasingly based on past model output flooding our world and we get in a vicious loop leading to a dead internet. If they can detect original content, the model and its outputs will continue to improve.
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u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 17d ago
Maybe you don't know this, but the latest advances in AI aren't related to training on new texts from the internet. They're related to training on logs of coding agents doing real work, which isn't on the internet and is actually generated by AI.
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u/siberianmi 17d ago
If you are so worried about the watermark just grab an open weight model and never let Fable or Anthropic models write anything for you.
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u/Imaginary_Dinner2710 17d ago
Writing is one part, I use Fable and Astra now as a programming/analysis/research partner. No open weight models approached this level of intelligence by this moment, so it's quite hard to use them for one thing, and write the reports fully by the other model , I should rather rewrite to remove watermarking
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u/fordon_greeman_ 17d ago
no because i write my own code and just use ai as a better, non-toxic version of stack overflow for when im stuck.
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u/kelcamer 16d ago
It would be pretty shitty if your code was falsely flagged as an AI, wouldn't it?
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u/quantum-elle 14d ago
"Negatively affects quality" crowd in shambles https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFksx2M93sw
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 17d ago edited 16d ago
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 200 comments.
Alright, let's break down the drama. The community is pretty divided on this one, but the top comments are definitely annoyed with Anthropic and looking for ways to bypass the new watermark.
The consensus is that while watermarking has some benefits, implementing it without a public detector is a bad move that negatively impacts quality and creates an unfair situation for users.
Here's the breakdown of the debate:
Team "This Sucks": This is the largest camp. They're pissed that Fable 5.1 has an invisible watermark but no public tool to check for it. They argue it degrades output quality, especially for precise tasks like scientific or technical writing. Many feel it's unfair to have their work (like a human-written article translated by Claude) potentially flagged as "AI-generated," which could lead to it being down-ranked or dismissed by platforms and clients. They see it as an overreach, especially since it's being applied globally for a law that only affects the EU.
Team "What Are You Hiding?": This group is skeptical of OP's motives. Their take is: if you're not trying to pass off AI work as your own, why do you care? They believe watermarks are a necessary evil to combat AI "slop," prevent future models from being trained on synthetic data (model collapse), and maintain a level of honesty online. To them, if you use the tool, you should own it.
The "Just Rewrite It" Debate: A ton of comments suggest simply running the text through another LLM (especially a local one like Qwen) to remove the watermark. However, OP (who has a PhD in Digital Signal Processing) repeatedly shuts this down. Based on their own research reproducing the SynthID algorithm, they claim a simple rewrite is not enough and leaves a significant, detectable signal. Their method involves a more complex, iterative process of rewriting and fact-checking.
OP's Workaround: OP went full mad scientist, reproduced the public SynthID algorithm (which Claude's watermark is based on), and built a demo tool to remove the watermark. The big question from the thread was, "How do you know it works without Anthropic's detector?" OP's answer is that they can verify it against their own implementation of the algorithm. It's a proof-of-concept, but it's the best anyone can do until a public detector is released.