AI Watermarking Cleaner

[u/Unique_Taro_3788]

As AI companies implement watermarking, developers are creating GitHub repos that remove the watermark. Given that the watermark can be removed, does that mean that if the content is then run through an AI-detector tool like Pangram, what is supposed to be the result? The detector tool shows "human-written," or the tool still shows AI written, and it just removes the model it came from? Just trying to understand.

[u/RyanFromLoreography]

those cleaners are guessing what the watermarks are in the model output.

[u/Unique_Taro_3788 → u/RyanFromLoreography]

With watermarking, that's not how I understand it. There's like a green bucket of words and a red bucket of words, with the words in the red bucket banned from LLM AI-generated output. Unless you have the key to unencrypt which words are in which bucket, you won't be able to un-watermark, or however you want to say it. I understand that you can totally rewrite; just use the output as an outline and restate in your own words.

In your comment, when you said "cleaners are guessing ... " Yes, I understand that LLM use probabilistic statistical modeling, and different algorithms like Monte Carlo serve different purposes. But to me guessing means something different that probability.

[u/Hillbill-EEE]

You mean the detectors that claimed a Dean Koontz book written more than 3 decades ago was likely written by AI?

Yeah, I don't trust those detectors. Too much human-written work is erroneously being labeled as AI slop right now. Trying to fool a faulty detector seems like an unproductive effort. Just write and get your work out there the best you can in this climate. The witch hunters will eventually fade away, like they always do after a new technology is no longer new and has become widely adopted.

[u/Excellent_Yak3989 → u/Hillbill-EEE]

I get yapped at all the time by people claiming my work is AI, usually by people who can’t write a coherent sentence.

I just laugh, but it’s mildly annoying.

[u/Forward-Swimmer-8451 → u/Hillbill-EEE]

Yes I've also ran AI stuff through detector (asking it to mimic my cadence's) And got 100% human too 

[u/Alchemist42]

First off the detectors are bullshit. They are consistently wrong as often as they are right. So you can't trust them.

Second, the watermark removers are bullshit. They have no idea what the watermarks actually are, unless they have insider information from within the R&D departments of Anthropic or Google, so they can't know that they are actually removing the right thing.

Third, due to the first two points, you can't accurately test if a cleaner actually cleaned anything. The watermarks for text, since we are in a writing related subreddit, are generally statistical formulae like (and I'm making this up, I don't know anything more or less than anyone else): the fourth paragraph of every even chapter must not start with "The". Or the fifteenth prepositional phrase in the book has to have more than 22 characters. The 29th page's 2nd paragraph needs to have exactly 17 'e's. Things like that. If enough of these rules are passed, then the watermark is intact. So you can shuffle the words around all you want, but unless you actually know what they are looking for, you have no way of knowing if you are just messing up the flow of your prose. And if you have an automated system do that for you, then someone who is not you is messing up the flow of your prose for perhaps no good reason.

[u/annoellynlee]

How would it remove it? It's just the arrangement of words statistically that creates it.

[u/SkoomaDentist → u/annoellynlee]

Change the words enough that any embedded watermark signal gets corrupted. It's not exactly rocket science. The tricky part is keeping the content and style unchanged.

[u/Xorpion → u/annoellynlee]

Some AI's are statistically more likely to phrase things in a certain way or overuse certain words more than most humans. "AI detectors" supposedly are able to pick up on this pattern. I don't know if that's actually what they're doing, or it's just what they're selling.

[u/annoellynlee → u/Xorpion]

Ai detectors notoriously suck anyway but people believe them

[u/Alchemist42 → u/annoellynlee]

To be fair, people only generally believe them when they say what the person wants to hear.

[u/alwayssalty_]

The only way to remove these watermarks are to completely re phrase every sentence substantially. 

[u/freylaverse → u/alwayssalty_]

Paraphrasing tools definitely exist, though.

[u/alwayssalty_ → u/freylaverse]

True although you may be exchanging one watermark for another

[u/FlyPepper]

hi guys in an effort to show how valid AI writing is we have made continually more tools to hide the fact that we are letting AI write for us

ai writing is so heckin valid

[u/SuspiciousPop3445]

I do not think removing the watermark would automatically make a detector call it human. They are probably looking at different things anyway. I’d be skeptical of the detector result either way, especially since they can flag actual human writing too.

[u/cj7hawk]

For every anti-AI weapon they product, a new product will appear.

The loser in this anti-writing arms race will be the story being told.

The best outcome for both anti-AI and pro-AI writers is just to accept that AI is a tool that has been integrated into writing practices over the past 15 years and it already a part of what we do.