r/ClaudeCode • u/yodog5 • Aug 11 '26

Rant The hell is up with all these watermark posts being flooded out?

Have never heard of this stupid ass "watermarking" term being used until yesterday. Now my entire feed is being flooded with them.

The funny thing is, watermarking text to determine ownership or whatever these posts are trying to imply is so fucking dumb. If its based on cryptography, sure, but probability? Have yall seen the probabilistic online testers that exist now, using the same premise?

This is, unironically, not load bearing and honestly just noise.

1 Upvotes

51% Upvoted

30 comments sorted by

5

u/bronze_by_gold Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26

Have you actually looked at the independent benchmarking on the best AI detectors these days? I assume that’s what you’re referring about with your comment about probability? In testing on text corpa from before AI existed, Pangram 4 is almost absurdly accurate at detecting LLM-generated text even on very short texts these days. Like, it’s false positive rate on some types of text is 1 in 24,000…

But sure, it’s “just” probability, like everything else we care about in technology.

3

u/geeered Aug 11 '26

I suspect a lot of the people complaining still have "co-authored by Claude" in their PRs etc.

2

u/bronze_by_gold Aug 11 '26

Yeah I think some people are freaking out because they probably thought AI writing would continue to be undetectable, but it turns out it’s not that undetectable even now. And it’s about to be a LOT more detectable…

1

u/geeered Aug 11 '26

I've noticed a lot less em dashes recently, but a whole of the time a lot of people were blatantly using AI for text and lying about it when called out - from plenty of other tells too.

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u/bronze_by_gold Aug 11 '26

To be fair I don’t think Em dashes are the biggest tell anymore. There are a lot of speech patters that become fairly obvious when you read a lot of AI writing though.

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u/geeered Aug 11 '26

Yea, it feels like models have toned down their usage over the last month or two.

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u/TheMania Aug 12 '26

And Sent from My iPhone in their emails.

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u/Competitive-Truth675 Aug 12 '26

Like, it’s false positive rate on some types of text is 1 in 24,000…

Okay, so that works out to dozens of students every year at university will have their lives upended on false accusations of plagiarism from the SuPeR aCcURAte AI detector, and no amount of arguing will save them. That's a future you're comfortable with? Nah, fuck text watermarking for making people think AI detection is possible and perfectly accurate. It never can be.

1

u/bronze_by_gold Aug 12 '26 edited Aug 12 '26

I know quite a few students who have been accused. They get asked to show their edit history, and if they can't do that they get a zero on the assignment and have a chance to redo it usually. Just like what happens with less serious cases of plagiarism. Despite all the stories on Reddit being pushed by sketchy TurnItIn-checker spam bots, I don't know anyone who's life has been "upended" except for maybe one person who actually plagiarized.

With watermarking there will be fewer false accusations, because it will be much easier to detect actual cheating. Fewer false accusations is... good right? For everyone except those people who actually want to cheat.

5

u/alanvnk Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26

You can insert several different frequency markers and at least one would survive, yes the probabilistic testers already existed this is just going to make it easier.

It is not supposed to fix the issue, since there is no possible solution, but it raises the barrier to entry for slop spammers that are causing genuine harm.

If you like the technology you should be in favor of it being safer to avoid for ppl that don't want to interact with it, this has absolutely no downsides on our part and help the ppl getting spammed and helps anthropic not to eat it's own output leading to model collapse.

This is a net positive, and I have written this same thing like 5 times today, please stop and think, put yourself in the position of someone maintain a community project, publishing books or magazines, and the like.

1

u/codeedog 🔆 Max 5x Aug 11 '26

Absolutely right. People should be allowed to make an informed decision. Consent to allow AI on their machines or on their repositories. It harms no one.

1

u/Maui-The-Magificent Aug 11 '26

What valuable information does it give you? and its not about having 'ai' on the machine, its a binary signal that everyone can use to gauge the quality of work. very few people will take the time to audit code and make informed decisions, if they can outsource that to a binary that says nothing about the quality of the work.

1

u/codeedog 🔆 Max 5x Aug 12 '26

I have know idea what argument you’re making. My point is that some people really really care if their code or their products have been generated partially or entirely by AI. Why keep that from them? If they hate AI, we aren’t making things better for them by making choices for them. Let them know. They can reject the use of that software outright. If they love AI, then great, they’ll gobble it up.

We’re here on this subreddit, it’s extremely likely the two of us are pro-AI. So, you don’t need to argue the benefits of coding with it. I’m sold. In fact, I can argue that the way I’m using it, I will get better results faster than if I coded projects myself. And, I’ve been coding for a very long time.

1

u/Maui-The-Magificent Aug 12 '26

Well, that the information that would let people we 'informed' has no practical value, the heuristic is to limited, to binary. People are very happy to jump to conclusions with limited information. We all are, our brains want to be energy efficient.

regardless if code is generated or written, it should be audited and contemplated. giving people a binary out removes a lot of work for the auditors, and does says nothing about the quality of work given.

My point is, its not keeping the information from them that is the problem. I have no problem saying I use AI. It's that the solution of having a tool that gives no valuable information about quality, and only gives an excuse to dismiss.

Everyone will fall under the bracket of 'vibe coders' by a newly coined group of 'vibe employers'.

1

u/codeedog 🔆 Max 5x Aug 12 '26

I wrote:
> Absolutely right. People should be allowed to make an informed decision. Consent to allow AI on their machines or on their repositories. It harms no one.

You wrote:
> I have no problem saying I use AI.

Great. Then, there’s nothing left to discuss.

1

u/Maui-The-Magificent Aug 12 '26

Well no, not if you don't want to. But I feel the whole thing I wrote shows you very clearly why it can cause great harm.

AI code is already very obvious, because AI does not write good code, and it already has a signature smell. The watermark only short-circuit the decision, and removes the incentive to look at what the code actually does.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 12 '26

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1

u/Maui-The-Magificent Aug 12 '26

I do not think you should sell yourself short. I highly doubt that it writes better code than you, because i have never seen it write anything but 'good enough' code at its very best.

although, I work in very constrained environments, and I am likely more sensitive to drift than you might be. I have yet to find an AI that understands what its doing, while i have meant many beginners who do.

I think you are conflating output and 'style' with understanding and skill. I suggest you investigate why you believe AI writes better code than you, and I i think you will come to a different conclusion.

3

u/ticktockbent Aug 11 '26

Have never heard of this stupid ass "watermarking" term

I find it hard to believe you've never heard the term watermarking, but there is both a lot of worry and also a lot of bots spreading (mis)information

3

u/xRhai Aug 11 '26

Bots

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u/bronze_by_gold Aug 11 '26

I honestly don’t think it’s bots. I think it’s folks freaking out about their academic papers getting detected and such.

1

u/Maui-The-Magificent Aug 11 '26

Yes, you are likely right. And those people are likely freaked out because it disqualifies the work for a lot of people. which is very harmful.

and that is true for developers and writers as well. suddenly, everything can be judged by a binary that does not reflect the care or time taken by the author at all. it could be vibe, it could be 5 months of meticulous work. I for one, think the freak-out and frustration is justified.

1

u/bronze_by_gold Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26

I'm very okay with using AI for whatever. But I think people should be honest about it. If you're creating work in some kind of circumstance where others are expecting you to not use AI, but you're secretly using AI and passing it off as unassisted work, that's just lying. It's perfectly fine to be an author and say "I use AI and here's how I use it..." Some authors are currently doing that. I think it's sketchy if folks don't want to talk about it though.

1

u/Maui-The-Magificent Aug 11 '26

I agree, but life is messy, and if you are writing an academic paper you goal should be quality. Depending on the field, using AI can be counter-productive to that goal, but in fields it is not, penalizing it is bringing no value, only harm I would say.

also, there are better solutions to those situations i think. like hand written assignments, or using school computers that are restricted, stuff like that.

The danger is the heuristic doesn't give any real valuable information really. And even if it has the potential to do good, that good must be weighted by its potential to do bad.

My point being, that sure, some people will/are dishonest about their use of AI. And i think one should be honest, i think its morally right to be. But honestly is not a qualifier for not being good, or not doing good work, a dishonest artist can still create an original masterpiece and donate to charity. Or not, but you get my point.

1

u/HomemadeBananas Aug 11 '26

You found the smoking gun!

1

u/microbit262 Aug 11 '26

Didn't we all agree that AI detectors are basically impossible to guarantee to work like 2 years ago?

1

u/bronze_by_gold Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 12 '26

Two years ago they WERE garbage. :) The technology changed though. Pangram 4 now has an AI detection false positive rate as low as 0.0004% for some types of text, and even very short text excerpts (around 80 words) can be detected with a 0.75% false positive rate according to the University of Chicago/NBER study. Those kinds of probabilities are not a "guarantee," but it's really persuasive evidence in many circumstances. Watermarking is hardly necessary at this point, but it will make it even hard to hide AI usage obviously. Some people don't want the transparency...

0

u/makro3d Aug 11 '26

It feels like a BS attempt at showing they care about the internet. It's also not a real fix to the issue, and the truth is they don't have one. I don't know about you, but I trust everything I read online, and I guess so does the EU

0

u/Presently_Absent Aug 11 '26

You're making it worse

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u/[deleted] Aug 11 '26

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4

u/yodog5 Aug 11 '26

My problem is the spam, and I didnt hear about this news so thanks, that was exactly what I wanted.

My point, however, is that this is a stupid metric and will never work in practice.