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How to avoid Claude watermarking your content
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Last week, Anthropic announced it would start watermarking text output from several of its LLMs via Claude to comply with Article 50 of the EU AI Act, which requires participating AI companies to provide transparency tools for AI-generated content. Public outrage at the watermarks multiplied as fast as the many watermark-removal tools now populating GitHub.
For those who didn't take kindly to the news, the solution seems obvious: find a way to avoid taking watermarks with you out of Claude. But, just like the many re-"humanizing" writing plugins now clogging app stores everywhere, turning to yet another fixer likely won't get us anywhere. A bigger-picture reset on our expectations of AI tools -- and why content provenance matters -- might help instead.
After initially not giving much detail about how the watermarks would work and who could read them, Anthropic released new guidance on Friday, clarifying that watermarks will attach to text based on specific word choices. LLMs generate a word at a time, chosen probabilistically based on the former word. In its explanation, Anthropic referred to synonyms like "overcast" or "gray," in the context of a sentence about the weather, as effectively meaning the same thing.
Anthropic explained that these "low stakes" word choices leave a pattern in generated text that readers can't detect, but that is legible to those with the key. Watermarking slightly changes this random word selection process.
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"Instead of using an arbitrary random number generator to pick the next word, watermarking uses the key and a few words that come before to settle what word the model should pick," Anthropic explained. "The words that Claude picks are still random, but now, one can check the sequence of words and see if it's consistent with the choices Claude would make if it was using the key. If it is, one can assign a probability that the text was generated by Claude."
One technologist in particular had several frustrations with this approach. In a recent blog post, John Gruber, co-creator of the Markdown markup language, disagreed that these word choices are "low stakes," and that the watermarking key won't "corrupt the semantics" of Claude's output. He isn't alone in that fear.
"The exact words we choose when writing matter," Gruber wrote. "I want any LLM I use to choose the very best, most precise words at every single decision point."
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