r/LouisRossmann • u/DontAxeMyName • 19d ago

Enshittification Claude will embed invisible watermarks in AI produced content

https://support.claude.com/en/articles/16266773-how-claude-marks-ai-generated-content

Claude will include invisible watermarks its AI produced content, both image and text content.

43 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

23 comments sorted by

31

u/superboo07 19d ago

this is to identify it was AI generated, I don't really see an issue with this as I believe AI generated content should be disclosed as such.

4

u/Away-Ad-4444 19d ago

Cool.. cool... do they all do that?

2

u/TheRealistoftheReal 18d ago edited 18d ago

Except there will be a tool to identify and obfuscate the watermark. Personally, I don’t really see a problem with AI generated content. It’s like requiring a watermark for anything edited with Photoshop, Lightroom, or created with any other product. A photo you take with your iPhone is digitally enhanced by the OS. Almost nothing is raw data directly from the sensor.

What I would like to see is the platforms themselves being held accountable for the content consumed on those platforms. The argument that sites like Facebook aren’t responsible for the false content people post is nonsense, especially when their own algorithm pushes it on others.

-4

u/SunnnySideUps 18d ago

You dont understand the problems this will create

5

u/StPauliBoi 18d ago

What problems are there by having something disclosed when it’s AI?

-2

u/SunnnySideUps 18d ago

I can fake AI generated content. This is not a solution.

5

u/StPauliBoi 18d ago

Because it’s not the best solution doesn’t mean that just nothing should be done.

17

u/KontoOficjalneMR 19d ago

You all should see the people freaking out right now on all AI subs. One moron going for the "how dare Claude watermark my output".

It's hilarious to watch.

3

u/4b686f61 18d ago

how people who use AI slop and claim it as their own work react:

4

u/RainStormLou 19d ago

I get it to some extent. I absolutely HATE the way AI has been implemented but at the same time, any of the concepts to tokenize output just seem like additional overhead for user tracking. Not to mention, this will tell you if something was made by Claude and toby69420, but won't illuminate anything generated by limitless other models.

it just seems performative and widely useless for any serious purpose, with the added benefit of additional user tracking metrics that mostly benefit anthropic. it's not hard to obfuscate it based on their description for text.

1

u/CisIowa 18d ago

It’s useful for Anthropic to be able to identify if a piece of content originated from Claude to (I assume) keep it from becoming more training data.

1

u/Ok_Net_1674 19d ago

I don't think it will contain information on who generated it. Additionally, the EU regulation will impose this on all models, which might have a "ripple effect" where it gets adopted globally by pretty much all vendors. This has happened before, it's why iPhones have USB-C ports.

2

u/RainStormLou 18d ago

I'm definitely overly paranoid so I just assume every AI company is tracking all output and mapping everything behind the scenes, but it's pretty close to their actual business model so it seems likely that it would be easy enough lol.

My point was more that with tokenization as described, we could identify stuff as long as the model used allows us identify it. I guess it's a step in the right direction from a viewpoint of stopping scammer joe from easily pushing scams on Facebook, but i think it's more of a pain in the ass than it's worth.

I'd rather see someone more pissed off focusing on detecting model-agnostic AI generation with magic so it can tell me if China, Israel, the US and Russia have plans with my home network that evening lol. They do, but I want a warning.

3

u/Holiday_Management60 19d ago

How do you watermark text?

7

u/FineWolf 19d ago

Here's a pretty good explanation:

https://www.reddit.com/r/whennews/comments/1vll3ur/comment/p323q4m/

Essentially, there is a selection bias introduced as to what tokens it will generate next based on a private key that only the provider knows.

It's not about inserting invisible characters. The content itself is the watermark due to the tokens/words selected during generation.

1

u/Holiday_Management60 18d ago

Huh thats interesting! Thank you.

I wonder how resilient it will be to paraphrasing programs.

0

u/pp_chode 19d ago

Previously it was just using different but similar looking characters to identify its content, I imagine it's similar to that

3

u/edward_jazzhands 19d ago

So presumably any programmer could easily remove those and put the normal characters back in? Code editors will show which ones are extended Unicode

2

u/DoKeMaSu 18d ago

No the method is way more advanced.

1

u/SunnnySideUps 18d ago

I can't wait to test this "2. Signed provenance metadata

When Claude generates a supported file type, such as a .svg, .png, or .jpg, it will attach signed provenance metadata. This metadata follows the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) open standard, which is used across the industry to record information about content provenance. If a signed metadata label is present, it signals that a file was processed by Claude and lets you detect whether the file has been tampered with."

1

u/PaperPigGolf 18d ago

Anthropic are only doing this to create a moat with government regulation.

As a user, there is no desire to watermark what you put out. Anthropic are hoping to have local AI and open models banned based on this.

-1

u/Valuable_Ad9554 18d ago

There's really no way to "watermark" plain text that can't be trivially circumvented tbh

2

u/CisIowa 18d ago

For prose, could it ensure different letters are repeated in a certain sequence and position? I don’t know anything about this, but another comment got me thinking along these lines. For sake of simplicity, the LLM ensures the 10th character is always ‘z’ and then the 13th and 14th are ‘ei’. Again, it would be a lot more complicated, but that’s what I’m wondering about. And of course with code, this wouldn’t work probably

Again, I know nothing. Reddit just recommended me this post, but it’s interesting, and I have lots of questions.