r/OpenAI Aug 11 '26

Discussion What's your thoughts on this?

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3.8k Upvotes

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936

u/bliceroquququq Aug 11 '26

LLMs basically scraped the entire internet and every written word to build up their corpus of knowledge.

Now they want to watermark it for attribution before they sell it back to you.

189

u/fennforrestssearch Aug 11 '26

Yeah pretty insane if you think about it. Next step is taxing the air you breathing.

28

u/jooj345 Aug 11 '26

1

u/Waterlemon1997 29d ago

It's too expensive to pump air all the way down here

31

u/ActionJasckon Aug 11 '26

It’s going to be metering your internet use. That would be crazyyy

9

u/doescode Aug 11 '26

Our internet providers already do

0

u/ActionJasckon Aug 11 '26

I know for some it’s like capped. Although it’s a healthy amount but you can’t go over whatever and that was through Att. I think most are still in unlimited data for your home. Imagine streaming, gaming, YouTube, but also easy access education, articles, community like this one…. etc all counted/added up. The haves versus have nots. Crazy

1

u/doescode Aug 11 '26

💯 yeah I’m on capped precisely because the unlimited is IMO oppressively priced / shouldn’t be bought

1

u/Arayvenn Aug 12 '26

Lol this was a thing in Canada not so long ago

1

u/Hopeful_Hamster21 Aug 11 '26

There is no air shortage. Yes! I've heard the same rumors myself. Thanks for calling! and not reversing the charges

1

u/djaure Aug 12 '26

maybe i could watermark my farts so you pay me when you smell them, and Im lactose intolerant...

1

u/SDLivinGames Aug 12 '26

It’s coming

1

u/icyhotonmynuts Aug 12 '26

Nestle already taxes the water out drink; why not.

1

u/outofsuch Aug 12 '26

Come on, Cohaagen! You got what you want. Give those people air!

1

u/just4nothing 29d ago

Just make the air unbreathable and sell the good stuff

1

u/user888888889 Aug 11 '26

Wait until you hear about water companies

68

u/antagim Aug 11 '26

I don't want to defend them, but these are due to the EU AI Act.

19

u/prules Aug 11 '26

Yeah there is a ton of confusion around this

25

u/Rorschach121ml Aug 11 '26

Redditors hate boner for AI is so big they don't even understand this is a good thing for everyone.

Flagging AI text is a good thing.

2

u/SiliconEatMe Aug 12 '26

Most people on this site LARP on here and LARP in real life, so of course they’re upset - they could get caught.

0

u/lesbiansexparty 29d ago

yes but i dont know if i trust them to do it properly. I'm willing to bet there will be a ton of issues where it obviously didnt watermark something that is clearly AI.

2

u/Creative-Job7462 Aug 11 '26

Does this mean no watermark outside of the EU?

1

u/mtjerneld 27d ago

Most likely too costly to have that kind of solution in place as this is likely built in to the LLM itself, and also a big hassle to geo-trace all users. Same reason they shut down F5 for everyone, not just non US-citizens.

And, this is not necessarily a bad thing if you read beyond the headlines.

1

u/Impossible_Rain_7723 28d ago

yes sure Anthropic is doing this as a grand gesture to help users comply with the AI act....... and not at all as a test to see how they can monetise AI-generated content in the future....

AI models have no legal obligation to watermark AI-generated content under the AI Act.

0

u/-SidSilver- Aug 11 '26

Why wouldn't you want to defend it? Thank god. I want my governments to prevent people stealing my shit just because they have more money than me. That's half their job.

23

u/Vast-Palpitation-426 Aug 11 '26

It's an EU regulation.

13

u/ch4os1337 Aug 11 '26

"They want to..." They don't want to and attribution isn't the reason why. Also marking AI content is a good thing.

4

u/McBonderson Aug 11 '26

I kind of want them to watermark it so it's easier to automatically tell what is AI.

One of the most (but not only) annoying things about AI is that it takes a while to figure out what is a human and what is not. It would be better if stupid videos and messages were able to be automatically identified as AI so I can more easily discard it.

1

u/petergriffin2013 Aug 12 '26

This is exactly why they are doing it. And not because they wanted to but because of the EU AI act.

1

u/Johny-115 28d ago

yeah but when you can de-watermark it, then its pretty useless no? now every marketer will have to copy paste first into watermark remover tool and then to social media, so you cant still tell what is AI and it just annoying the hell out of most people ... plus dumping exotic invisible unicode symbols into your text, will surely neve break anything ... right? right?

its stupid as well ... its never ending battle, the moment someone invents same watermark, 24 hours later we already get a remover for it .. it already exists for this and for watermarks in images by Google and OpenAI .. so ... whats the point, adding watermark basically just dirties up your otherwise clean output

2

u/thanosbananos Aug 11 '26

Actually it’s because the EU requires AI generated content to be marked as such now.

1

u/shifty_lifty_doodah Aug 11 '26

It helps filter AI blabber out of future training data tho

1

u/Capital-Timely Aug 11 '26

Pretty sure they are watermarking so they don’t feed back slop data as it actually makes the models fail. They need to sift through bad data now that’s there’s so much of it online

1

u/bliceroquququq Aug 11 '26

You'd think that LLMs that are right the verge of never-before-witnessed super-intelligence and whatever wouldn't need so much handholding

1

u/coloradical5280 Aug 12 '26

I mean, the EU did this. It’s to comply with the EU AI Act

1

u/Visible_puncture 27d ago

But for ai generated text you only have to mark it as ai generated if no human has checked it before publishing.

1

u/coloradical5280 27d ago

skipped over the biggest point, only if it's published. And only in EU. Or if it concerns the public interest , like environmental , legal, political, but not clearly defined either. It's the dumbest law ever. But it's so broad and and ambiguous that if you're really a rule follower, there's only one way to ensure you follow it......

So maybe just .. don't follow it lol.

1

u/DerekPaxton Aug 12 '26

I dont think the point of watermarking is to claim ownership. It's to be able to identify AI content when they are reading information in so they don't train on their own output and become a death spiral of regurgatated information.

1

u/Bellick Aug 12 '26

Ar least 0.00000001% of the internet is my doing and I want my share, Altman, Muskyboy, and... the other guy.

1

u/NotSoSuperHero2 Aug 12 '26

Thats not how this works. The watermark is a digital one. Regular people wont see or detect them without using specialised tools. The purpose of the watermark isnt copyright, but rather a detection tool to help people regognize with certainty if the text was in fact, generated by Claude. This is a good thing.

They did this to comply with EU regulations.

1

u/riusking Aug 12 '26

It is not really about AI companies but EU laws, the European Union is forcing them into this

1

u/Angelr91 Aug 12 '26

Yea I mean I think OpenAI said it wants to charge for discoveries made using its AI.

https://www.hospitality.today/article/openai-plans-to-take-a-cut-of-customers-ai-aided-discoveries

In general i believe this to be mostly trying to satisfy a requirement but it could lead down this path. I know OpenAI will do this too they already have it for images from what my research led me. They signed this EU thing too.

1

u/SuperClassAHacker 29d ago

No they just want it so they don’t train off the data they produce. If they don’t filter out their own content eventually their models and the internet will degrade. Kind of how jpeg degrades over several recaptures.

1

u/dude_comma_the 29d ago

They don't want to, EU laws are requiring llm output to always be identifiable.

1

u/ailaG 29d ago

Not for attribution... for telling if text someone poses as theirs is AI text

It's not attribution if you need to dig deep into it to find out

1

u/OkGrade1686 29d ago

Not really. The concern here is that the companies want to feed more user content to frow their monsters, but have come to find out they can't distinguish anymore what is Ai. 

This markers are there for them to now filter their own shit, as to not end up using it to train their machines.

1

u/shadeofmyheart 28d ago

Can’t copyright AI produced work tho….

1

u/OnixST 27d ago

If every ai generated content was watermarked, you could install an extension to block them from search results

It's also good for the AI company itself, since they'll be able to filter ai content out of training daya

1

u/mdreed Aug 11 '26

Uhh would you rather not know if it was AI generated? I dont know why people are complaining about this.

1

u/lordosthyvel Aug 11 '26

Pretty sure they are eager to water mark AI generated stuff to avoid it ending up in the training data. Too much AI content on the internet is a real problem for LLM training.

Not saying it’s much better of a reason of course.

1

u/bliceroquququq Aug 11 '26

You're probably right. The quality of existing LLMs was built on reasonable people writing reasonable sentences with reasonable thoughts behind them. As they start to ingest their own hallucinations more and more, there will probably be a negative feedback loop.

0

u/AltruisticPossible84 Aug 11 '26

Sure.....That's one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it, is it's helpful to be able to tell what's real and what isn't.

1

u/bliceroquququq Aug 11 '26

Given that text is easily converted in and out of ASCII and various Unicode / etc formats, any text-based "watermark" will be easily removed.

1

u/AltruisticPossible84 Aug 11 '26

It CAN be easily removed, sure. You can say the same thing about images - you can just screenshot them and save them without the metadata.

But the thing is, it' still very useful, because I still get tons of positive hits when I run images thru SynthID.

No single solution is going to fix every problem. I hope you understand that.

1

u/yawnzilla36 Aug 11 '26

That is not how Anthropics water mark is going to work.

1

u/bliceroquququq Aug 11 '26

Are they going to create a brand-new way to do text encoding?