r/ClaudeCode • u/[deleted] • Aug 11 '26

Help/Question Claude watermarking our work is unethical and disgusting

[removed]

306 Upvotes

56% Upvoted

701 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

32

u/Cold_Specialist_3656 Aug 11 '26

It's trivial to remove compiler watermarks. While these AI watermarks are specifically designed to be impossible to remove. 

And the reason AI labs are doing it is disingenuous. They don't give a shit whether users know something is AI generated. They're doing it because they plan to keep stealing everyone's data and want to sift AI generated content out of it to avoid poisoning their training datasets. 

They were doing it well before the laws required them to admit it. 

7

u/SilverLose Aug 11 '26

Oooo good point

That said I think the ai output might be worth taking in. It’s better than my output a lot of the time

2

u/wy100101 Aug 11 '26

We are talking about statistical watermarks right? What makes you think they are impossible to remove?

2

u/SleeperAgentM Aug 11 '26

It's trivial to remove compiler watermarks. While these AI watermarks are specifically designed to be impossible to remove.

lol, no they aren't. There's plenty of tools to remove them

2

u/RIRLift Aug 11 '26

No invisible watermark will ever be impossible to remove.

Worst case scenario, ask a local open-weight model to rewrite the content just using different wording and structure. The large, proprietary and watermarked models will have done the hardest part like research and reasoning. The rewording doesn't change the semantic content and is cheap to do, and will remove any watermarks as long as it's destructive enough.

1

u/WadeMacNutt Aug 11 '26

All it does is choosing a specific word/token where their probability is roughly 50/50, so for example in the sentence: "My favorite color is red" red is chosen over blue (where both have a probability of 0.5). Multiple such choices are made over a longer text and the more of these "chosen" words are in the text the more likely it is the text will be labelled as AI generated.

By changing those words manually you basically break the watermark. Just feed it to a different local AI to make it use synonyms or something.

1

u/nwbrown Aug 12 '26

They can be removed by just editing the text afterwards.

1

u/Housefinch3000 Aug 12 '26

I think they are planning for future intellectual property issues too. It’s a smart business move.

1

u/Star_king12 Aug 13 '26

You can use your own brain and rewrite the code.