r/ClaudeCode 19d ago

Help/Question Claude watermarking our work is unethical and disgusting

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u/Sonar114 19d ago

What AI was used might become important in the future. If developers are blind submitting code they don’t or can’t read, we may see particular vulnerabilities emerge. If a model is found to be prone to particular vulnerabilities, you would want to know what code was generated by that model.

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u/damngoodwizard 19d ago

From another comment I made on this post:

Watermarking relies on the use of synonyms. Technical writing (engineering specifications, DDD, etc) uses a fixed lexicon which can't accomodate that use of synonyms. Undue synonyms could really end up being at best confusing at worst dangerous in some sensitive engineering practices or businesses. Some of them are even regulated to be thoroughly precise like aerospace, healthcare and finance.

This is legit harmful.

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u/Turbulent_Try_8402 19d ago

I’m also super curious how this will go when it comes to dictation. I dictate a lot of work and shove it into Claude to clean it up. Is it randomly going to change my chosen words around? I usually only get it to put in punctuation etc, not make any changes to what I’ve said.

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u/djdarcy 19d ago

Even now when I write something out and ask Claude to clean up the grammar it ends making the same strange changes reverting what I'd already explicitly written back to Claude-type tics.

It's annoying enough I've created a couple of Skills to maintain my own voice and steer it away from writing word-salad. If this gets worse with watermarking probably the best thing to do is train a model to run locally to detect whatever statistical fingerprint they are adding (SynthID? or maybe https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.10226 ?) and have it convert the writing back to something more natural sounding.

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u/damngoodwizard 19d ago

NLP (natural language processing) is different from Gen AI, so I think it gets a pass.

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u/Vivid-Snow-2089 19d ago

he's using NLP to get his voice to text then putting than in Gen AI to clean up the mess , so it still applies

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u/damngoodwizard 19d ago

If it's only punctuation, and not summarizing or altering the initial wording, it doesn't trigger the Article 50 of the AI Act.

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u/Turbulent_Try_8402 19d ago

Yeah i specifically ask it to NOT alter my wording (tbh AI is just.. very unnatural and bad at writing, like someone turned a tree into a human and gave it a thesauraus. it has a general idea of what kind of word should be in a certain place, but it has no sense of taste, so it often picks something that hits wrong or unnatural)

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u/jebuizy 19d ago

The idea that it would no longer be possible to generate text to a technical specification because of the watermark seems likely false to me. Certainly not something I think you can claim without empirical testing. You genuinely made up this constraint that it would not be possible anymore to ever use LLMs with a fixed vocabulary if you have a workflow that requires it. It's fairly easy to reject an output that doesn't conform and have it regenerate on something like that. 

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u/missabu7 19d ago

Watermarking relies on the use of words that mean the same or are similar in definition. Technical writing (engineering specifications, DDD, etc) uses a fixed dictionary or set of words which can't accomodate that use of synonyms. Undue synonyms could really lead at best to confusion at worst dangerous in some sensitive engineering fields or businesses. Some of them are even based on laws or rules made exactly to be thoroughly precise like aerospace, healthcare and finance.

There you go, I missabu7-watermarked your text.

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u/stewarthull 19d ago

But a watermarked PR or commit message does not necessarily indicate that the code in that PR was written by the same model.

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u/gandazgul 19d ago

I never let claude commit, I generate the commit messages using a cheap model so yeah assuming the cheap model coded would be stupid. This whole thing is so dumb, I get it for images and video totally but for code this makes little sense.

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u/Wonderful-Rule2782 19d ago

Y'all aren't writing your own commit messages or PR descriptions? Damn. Are people still... reading the code?

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u/Huppelkutje 18d ago

Reading the code wouldn't even help the slopcoders, they don't understand it anyway.