Anthropic Criticized For Adding Watermarks to Text that Claude Generates - or Processes (futurism.com) 90
This week Anthropic announced its Claude chatbot will watermark the text it generates, reports the blog Futurism. "It works by making subtle changes in the AI's word choices across the text it generates, which are supposed to be imperceptible to a human but, in aggregate, form a pattern that is detectable with the tool."
Anthropic said it was implementing the watermark system in response to the European Union's landmark AI Act passed in 2024, which requires that AI companies mark content that's been generated or edited by their systems.
TechCrunch notes that other companies including Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Synthesia have committed to adhering to the EU's code. But "The news about Claude watermarking kicked off a firestorm on X," reports Forbes, "with users panicking that AI-assisted writing will now bear a kind of permanent 'scarlet letter.'" (Forbes wonders if media companies are normalizing AI "while at the same time stigmatizing the output.")
But there's another issue. Anthropic said the watermark indicates Claude processed text, Business Insider points out, "not that it was necessarily the original author. The company said marks can remain after Claude proofreads, translates, summarizes, or otherwise edits content... a watermark shows that Claude processed text, not necessarily that it wrote it."
In the days since, "Dozens of people have posted on X since Monday that they had canceled their Claude subscriptions, citing the watermark." Vladislav Rajtmajer, a freelance developer in the Czech Republic, told Business Insider he canceled his Claude Max subscription on Tuesday, citing the watermark as the main reason. He said he uses AI for code reviews and translations, and worried an AI label on code shipped to clients could raise questions about authorship or trigger contract penalties... Richard Echols, an AI consultant in Georgia, also said he canceled his Claude Max subscription on Wednesday and that the watermark was a major factor in his decision. He said he uses Claude to create documentation for businesses and worried the mark could appear when he had written the underlying material himself and used the chatbot only for edits. "Even if you edit your own work that you wrote, they add the watermark anyway," Echols said...
Anthropic isn't the only AI lab to use watermarks: Google uses its SynthID technology to watermark AI-generated content, and OpenAI uses SynthID for supported images and audio. Elon Musk's social media platform X also adds a "Made with AI" tag on content it determines to be AI-generated or manipulated.
Long-time Slashdot reader kmleon (also a tech consultant and RPG researcher) experienced another issue. He'd built some software using their own custom-built AI tool, only asking Claude to do some testing. "Little did I know that Claude would sometimes decide, since it was involved on the edges... to take credit for all of my work, claiming some parts were either '100%' or 'Co-Authored/Created' by Claude.Ai / Claude Code!" I'm sure the good folks at Anthropic will eventually tweak Claude enough to, hopefully, not make these mistakes in the future.... I only became aware of it today, because I recently setup scanners to catch Claude incorrectly watermarking any content it touches for various projects I'm working on. I found that it has (apparently as far back as Sonnet 4.6, but as recently as today, August 14th, 2026) sometimes been mistakenly over-zealous in taking credit for 100% creating or co-authoring docs, code, images, videos, etc. I've only, so far, found about a dozen instances spanning the past year, and most of them appear to have been injected in the last few weeks, so it is not a common issue (yet).
On the bright side? Maybe watermarks can help AI stop training on AI-generated text.
Although Forbes also reports that Google "announced on Friday that it will now let users remove the visible watermark from AI-generated images, videos and music created with several of its models."
TechCrunch notes that other companies including Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Synthesia have committed to adhering to the EU's code. But "The news about Claude watermarking kicked off a firestorm on X," reports Forbes, "with users panicking that AI-assisted writing will now bear a kind of permanent 'scarlet letter.'" (Forbes wonders if media companies are normalizing AI "while at the same time stigmatizing the output.")
But there's another issue. Anthropic said the watermark indicates Claude processed text, Business Insider points out, "not that it was necessarily the original author. The company said marks can remain after Claude proofreads, translates, summarizes, or otherwise edits content... a watermark shows that Claude processed text, not necessarily that it wrote it."
In the days since, "Dozens of people have posted on X since Monday that they had canceled their Claude subscriptions, citing the watermark." Vladislav Rajtmajer, a freelance developer in the Czech Republic, told Business Insider he canceled his Claude Max subscription on Tuesday, citing the watermark as the main reason. He said he uses AI for code reviews and translations, and worried an AI label on code shipped to clients could raise questions about authorship or trigger contract penalties... Richard Echols, an AI consultant in Georgia, also said he canceled his Claude Max subscription on Wednesday and that the watermark was a major factor in his decision. He said he uses Claude to create documentation for businesses and worried the mark could appear when he had written the underlying material himself and used the chatbot only for edits. "Even if you edit your own work that you wrote, they add the watermark anyway," Echols said...
Anthropic isn't the only AI lab to use watermarks: Google uses its SynthID technology to watermark AI-generated content, and OpenAI uses SynthID for supported images and audio. Elon Musk's social media platform X also adds a "Made with AI" tag on content it determines to be AI-generated or manipulated.
Long-time Slashdot reader kmleon (also a tech consultant and RPG researcher) experienced another issue. He'd built some software using their own custom-built AI tool, only asking Claude to do some testing. "Little did I know that Claude would sometimes decide, since it was involved on the edges... to take credit for all of my work, claiming some parts were either '100%' or 'Co-Authored/Created' by Claude.Ai / Claude Code!" I'm sure the good folks at Anthropic will eventually tweak Claude enough to, hopefully, not make these mistakes in the future.... I only became aware of it today, because I recently setup scanners to catch Claude incorrectly watermarking any content it touches for various projects I'm working on. I found that it has (apparently as far back as Sonnet 4.6, but as recently as today, August 14th, 2026) sometimes been mistakenly over-zealous in taking credit for 100% creating or co-authoring docs, code, images, videos, etc. I've only, so far, found about a dozen instances spanning the past year, and most of them appear to have been injected in the last few weeks, so it is not a common issue (yet).
On the bright side? Maybe watermarks can help AI stop training on AI-generated text.
Although Forbes also reports that Google "announced on Friday that it will now let users remove the visible watermark from AI-generated images, videos and music created with several of its models."
quiet part out loud (Score:3, Interesting)
"but if it watermarks its work, that will mean people will know that I didn't write the thing..."
my sweet summer child, nobody was under the impression that you used your personal ability to write that paragraph of slop.
Re:quiet part out loud (Score:5, Interesting)
The incentive to use AI to generate content and then pass it off as human-generated content is very strong. Especially right now. There is real money in the ability to lie about this, and so people absolutely want to. Many won't admit it in these terms, but the incentives are objective realities and that's all anyone needs to know in order to predict human behavior in aggregate.
Further, this watermarking does not solve the problem. It just means that people who want to deceive will simply have to use different models instead. Such models will come along one way or another; demand for them will ensure it. Tools will also surface that can detect and remove these watermarks, with varying degrees of success, to neuter the feature. It's an arms race that guarantees the intention behind this move will utterly fail.
The AI law that requires this was drafted by people who didn't think this through. It is in their nature to think that regulation can solve every problem. Enforceability is a factor too, and this law is basically dead on arrival on that front.
Re: quiet part out loud (Score:3, Informative)
Watermark removal is available for almost no cost now. Google Translate and then back. Or just pop the text into Grammarly, etc.
Re: quiet part out loud (Score:4, Interesting)
Watermark removal is available for almost no cost now. Google Translate and then back.
Depending on the language you choose, that's probably not going to work as well as you assume.
Random sample from the web:
Electric cars are the future in the auto industry. As climate change gets worse, governments are going to start
limiting the number of gasoline cars being built. The cost of gas will continue to rise, which will make it harder for
people to afford to run gas powered cars. As battery technology improves, electric cars will be able to travel
further on a charge and cost less to buy. Eventually most gas powered cars will be replaced by electric cars.
Translated to Japanese and back. Other languages will give different round trip translations:
Electric vehicles are a future for the automobile industry. As technology advances, national governments will begin to drastically
reduce the production of gasoline vehicles. Gasoline cars will continue to improve, and gasoline cars will become more readily available.
Electric vehicles, which do not require a battery technology factory, will be able to operate more efficiently with just one battery,
and their cost will also decrease. In short, most gasoline cars are no different from electric vehicles.
You are correct - sending the original text through Google Translate will most definitely get rid of AI watermarks. It will also get rid of any meaningful information compared to the original text.
Re: quiet part out loud (Score:3)
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True, in fact it might give a word-for-word translation round trip, which would defeat the purpose of trying to get rid of the watermarked phrasing.
Without knowing exactly which phrase in a 10-ish page document is the watermarked phrase, you would have to hope the translating round trip would remove or modify the phrase without introducing translation or logical errors. Overall I don't think using Google translate would be as helpful as he hoped.
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I'm not sure how well that would work on this. I don't know the specific algo they're using, but an early, primitive one was even-odd. You divide all tokens into two groups, A and B. When generating, on even tokens you somewhat boost the odds of tokens from A, while on odd tokens, you somewhat boost the odds from B. If a high-probability word is coming up it won't meaningfully alter it, but if there's different ways something can be phrased, it can cause changes in the phrasing choice to match the A/B bo
Re:quiet part out loud (Score:5, Insightful)
Further, this watermarking does not solve the problem.
And it's not required by the EU AI Act. They require disclosure. That doesn't mean watermark. It can be a note attached to an image, it can be a statement on the website where you post that image, etc. - Anthropic is overreacting, because as I read the law, the fact that you are inside Claude doing stuff would already suffice.
The thing the law goes against is people connecting you to an AI chatbot in customer support while pretending that you're talking to a human. Or AI bots posting to social media without revealing that they are AI bots.
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That's a good point. Yes, it could be Anthropic simply making sure that they can't be blamed if someone doesn't disclose AI usage. Now they can say: "We did everything we could to make sure AI usage is visible".
Though I doubt it'll hold up in court unless the watermark is obvious. Because, again, the law requires disclosure. I don't think a hard-to-detect watermark would satisfy that demand.
Re: quiet part out loud (Score:2)
The same Anthropic will sell you the tools to detect the watermark ;)
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By Anthropic's description, if I write thousands of words of my own work and ask Claude to check for any spelling mistakes, and Claude says "one typo, you wrote CIa instead of CIA, fixed" what comes back has the watermark.
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... what comes back has the watermark.
The don't use what comes back.
Instead, edit your original to incorporate the fixes identified by your tool-of-choice.
If the tool doesn't give you a list of changes made, just an amended version of the document, then diff them.
Re:quiet part out loud (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have to rely on AI to do that, all hope is lost. If you cannot take the output of AI and then fix the error yourself in the original document.
Are people so damn lazy that they're helpless if AI doesn't help them go to the bathroom nowadays?
If you're so worried about being caught out, you can still use AI in meaningful ways. Sure they cost more work than being lazy, but that isn't seen as a bad thing.
You want AI to proofread your work? Go for it. But instead of asking it to output a fixed copy, ask it for criticisms and suggestions. Then fix the document yourself using those suggestions. If you are doing your job, you probably have more context and can make it work.
The people who are scared the ones doing the scamming. Like a lawyer who files a brief written by AI who doesn't take 5 minutes to verify it. Probably takes them 15 minutes, but they charged the client a full hour for it and profiting off the charged 45 minutes of work that wasn't done.
Use AI, it's a technology that's not going away. But use it smartly and watch what happens to the output. And maybe apply some human effort to it and maintain a pipeline where human content comes in, and human content comes out. Ai can enter the pipeline, but the original document is only touched by humans who operate under suggestions made by AI but otherwise have full agency.
My resume was human generated. It was run through ChatGPT for suggestions on improvement. It made some, including helping me reword a troublesome bullet point. But I took that and edited the original document myself, throwing away the rest of the content which contained so much hallucinated junk I would lose any job I applied for.
If you're so worried about being found out, you're using AI wrong.
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Does your spellcheck has a "replace" option or do you retype each word that's wrong? Do you retype the phrases Grammarly (which is also backed by LLM in recent versions) found to be wrong manually? Why are you opposed to tools correcting you? Do you think a text has more soul when you retype the correct spelling after the LLM found the wrong one?
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I am not sure what you're trying to say.
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Welcome to the future... it's cold and shiny titanium!
The kids can't even do simple math anymore, have to have their Meta Glasses read what's on the screen.
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That is rather unlikely. Because it would make it exceptionally easy to detect what they are doing. On the other hand, this is to satisfy EU law and I guess it will be as weak as they think they can get away with.
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By Anthropic's description, if I write thousands of words of my own work and ask Claude to check for any spelling mistakes, and Claude says "one typo, you wrote CIa instead of CIA, fixed" what comes back has the watermark.
You know word has a spell check right? What would you have done just a few years back, type out your work then just send it off?
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By Anthropic's description, if I write thousands of words of my own work and ask Claude to check for any spelling mistakes, and Claude says "one typo, you wrote CIa instead of CIA, fixed" what comes back has the watermark
The watermark comes from subtle choices in the frequency of words. For the watermark to be effective, Claude needs to be able to mess around with word choice in order to leave its imprint. Changing the spelling of a single word gives Claude no place to add a watermark.
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You can't embed a watermark in one word. In particular not when you introduce a correct word replacing a wrong one.
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If all that's changed is one word, there's not nearly enough word choices by Claude to allow them to put in the watermark. The watermark is based upon word choices.
So that specific incidence wouldn't actually get watermarked, not unless Claude decides to do more than correct one typo.
OTOH, it's entirely possible the response "one typo, you wrote CIa instead of CIA, fixed" would be worded in such a way that it would include the watermark. Which would make sense and fit with what Anthropic are claiming. It wo
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Well, unless you're typing it up in Notepad, fairly sure your office word program has a spell checker and a grammar checker in it.
Will kids realize "Clod" is making itself known when they have "Clod" do their homework?
Anthropic : All your base belong to us (Score:2)
And you can bet on it that they will want you o pay up for it.
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That comes when the stock market bubble pops, because by then, AI will be so baked into ever aspect of life that you can't escape it... you'll either pay or you can't so much as make toast, if you don't pay your fridge won't keep stuff cold... odds are it'll be like your cable bill or maybe as devious as making it part of your unavoidable taxes, or maybe it'll just suck the fees straight out of your bank.
If only all people were honest (Score:5, Interesting)
It's OK to use tools, but tool users should be honest about the tools they use.
Woodworkers have no problem with this. There is skill in using a tool like a wood lathe, and craftspeople proudly show their work.
The problem with AI is untalented people using the tool to defraud publishers.
I suspect that as the tool becomes more common, there will be an unmistakable difference between AI work made by a talented tool user and low effort slop.
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If publishers are getting the measurable results they asked for, nobody is getting defrauded.
The actual problem here is the guy who gets paid by the token found another excuse for his robot to generate more tokens I didn't ask for.
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Too simple.
The problem is that the lathe doesn't pretend to be a human, nor was it designed to look like a human. But AI bots are.
AI is here to stay. At least until the Butlerian Jihad. The problem most people have with AI pretending to be human.
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AI has pretended to be human since ELIZA. It very much isn't the problem most people have, as they would have been complaining about it for decades. The problem most people have seem to be based around:
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Personally, I think the definition will change.
Already, if you say "hand-crafted chair", nobody is going to assume that you didn't use power tools.
Re: If only all people were honest (Score:2)
A bad table made with only hand tools isn't better than a good table that was mass produced.
"On the bright side" (Score:3, Funny)
On the bright side? Maybe watermarks can help AI stop training on AI-generated text.
Oh, yes, terrific news. Wouldn't want to curtail the destruction of physical books as they get ripped up, scanned for LLM training, and discarded.
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You understand
A) no actual rare or precious books have been proved to have been destroyed, right?
B) millions of books are destroyed every single day. Millions. And that processing has nothing to do with ai. It has been true for decades.
Your rage about this is either misinformed, or dishonest.
Either way, maybe think about that.
Re: "On the bright side" (Score:2)
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Genuine question, what rare books have they destroyed?
I'm absolutely serious. You refer to it as if it's a proved thing but every single story I've traced back to the source has ended up with (more or less) "well someone told me they were doing it".
Meanwhile, it makes no sense and doesn't pass the reality test.
1) the value LLMs get from books is almost entirely vernacular, idiom, and patterns of credible speech. Facts they can get in abundance and vastly easier/cheaper/faster from the bajilions of sources
Re: "On the bright side" (Score:2)
There's a big story in the news about it today, I'd link it if I were on desktop, go look it up though
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Yes, in a sane society allegations must be proved, not innocence. Your stance is ridiculous.
I've asked in the multiple repostings of this story - what ACTUAL RARE BOOK has been destroyed?
Name one.
Old books? Sure. The dumpsters of public libraries are FULL of books constantly thrown away. "Old" could mean a book from 1965.
All of this is vague, the original story is full of insinuations and hysteria.
The original title of the book with the airtag and the other ~1,000 titles in that specific Biblio bulk orde
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https://www.404media.co/we-tra... [404media.co]
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And?
"This post is for paid members only"
Breaking News (Score:3)
More at 11
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It's so obvious to me when a Youtube script is written by Claude, even when read by a human.
Odd that all that training still doesn't predict human-like next words. There must be prompts to favor certain voicings.
Enjoy your abysmal watch-percentage metrics
as we click away, boys.
It's sad when good old channels decide to cash-grab with slop and dishonesty.
On the bright side? (Score:2)
>On the bright side? Maybe watermarks can help AI stop training on AI-generated text.
You're living in 2023 if you think any company worth their salt is still scraping the live internet for quality content. Everyone has their own curated library already Nobody has been scraping en masse for at least two years, unless there's a blog article about bleeding edge science research or something. Even then they will probably just scrape the scientific paper itself, rather than coverage of it.
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Ask the average system administrator who maintains any small website whether the AI companies are still scraping the web, and you might find yourself surprised. Pretty much anything with high quality content that isn't a major well funded site like Reddit or Wikipedia is getting hammered to the point that websites are either constantly going down, or resorting to reCAPTCHA and other similar "Legit or AI?" technologies to limit their use. Every BBS/etc I've been using lately has that anime nurse with a magni
Re: On the bright side? (Score:2)
They are being self-hoisted though, if your site has a lot of caching and isn't doing an shitload of tracking or generating a ton of ads then the cost of being scanned by AI is low. It's only sites with lots of aggressive ads, tracking, and/or algorithmic feed generation that are impacted.
scarlet letter (Score:4, Insightful)
AI-assisted writing will now bear a kind of permanent 'scarlet letter.'
Perfect. That is it how it should be.
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We need an AI proof society (Score:2, Troll)
Good (Score:2, Interesting)
Guess what? Now the essay you generated for school, now has a tell-tale sign that it's generated by AI. It makes it easier for your teacher to give you a failing grade.
Guess what? The book you entirely "wrote" with AI, now contains tell-tale signs your publisher will easily find, so they can blacklist you.
Guess what? Vibe coders are more easily caught in the act.
In general this is a really good thing.
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Guess what? If I happen to use a particular sequence of words, I get called out for using AI when I don't even know what the trigger words are! (I mention this because this type of thing happens to me a lot where I say a particular sequence of words and it triggers people in a way unknown to me previously)
In general, there are a lot of good and bad things.
(lol, CAPTCHA was 'flawed', same as your reasoning)
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Re: Good (Score:2)
Clanker Accent (Score:2)
The clankers already have an "accent" that we can often see. Sometimes form a mile away. This just removes doubt and makes the accent always perceptible, at least to Claude and likely to future scripts/algos. I can't get worked up over this one.
I don't see a down side to always being able to spot clanker speak.
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Username checks out.
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I often wonder how people perceive my username. Do they think I'm a bot, an AI agent?
Then I think, what if I am an AI agent? What if we're all living in a simulation? Then I think, that's fucking stupid. Only morons beleive that simulation shit. I'm totally real.
Then I think, I need some potato chips.
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Was Agent Smith the first well known AI agent?
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I doubt it. Does HAL 9000 count as an agent. It is the first to come to mind.I, Robot (Also Asimov.) came before 2001. I'm sure that there were others, probably earlier as well.
Contract penalties? (Score:2)
> He said he [..] worried an AI label on code shipped to clients could [..] trigger contract penalties
My dude if you are facing penalties if someone finds out you're using AI then watermarks are the least of your worries.
Change your contract or change how do you work. Nobody's obliged to help you cheat your clients.
"Whaaa, Whaaa, I can't cheat!" (Score:2)
So? (Score:3)
That's fine, and I use Claude for software development. I check what it creates, and my goal is just to create the lines of code that I would have created, but faster. It can watermark those lines of code if it wants. My employer knows I use the AI coding assistant, pays the monthly fee, and wants me to make use of it to produce the same code faster.
But I suppose this is mostly about kids using it to do their homework, or people using it to try to defraud others. 100% good idea.
How hard would it be (Score:2)
plagerize (Score:1)
That's exactly the idea and exactly the fact. Any use of text-generating/modifying AI constitutes manifest plagiarism begging for discipline: ( like that Oxbridge gent who just shot himself ) . You didn't think theft was free
Watermark erasure (Score:2)
My understanding is that the system in question is a statistical 'choice of synonym' algorithm. I'm a little surprised we're not hearing about synonym randomization using local llm's to 'wash away' watermarks like this and ... Oh ... never mind â" https://github.com/guillaumeme... [github.com].
Em dash intentional :-)
Anything AI processes should be clearly marked. (Score:2)
Watermarking is like a citation or disclaimer at the end of a document, it has a purpose. Only cheaters and liars should worry that it exists.
Re: Anything AI processes should be clearly marked (Score:2)
Quality stands on it's own. I don't care what tools anyone uses for anything; this isn't performance art. Slop is slop and it's nothing new. No one gets a pass because their slop is handmade.
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The quality argument I might buy. The user is free to fix the grammar though.
Quality can stand on it's own, but not if some one else or some thing else did all the work for which you claim - that should be disclosed - and humans have proven many can't be trusted to disclose anything willingly.
What about the false positives? (Score:2)
The core problem is not the watermarking, or the requirement to disclose. It's the false positives, and an anti-AI crowd that is attacking and destroying anyone they perceive, rightly or wrongly, as using AI. IMHO, false claims of AI use are far more harmful than any actual usage of AI. Writers are being shut out because of such false claims. A false positive can badly damage a writer's career, causing them real harm.
Previously existing tools, such as ZeroGPT, are so egregious with false positives that they
It's only a tool. (Score:2)
An LLM is just a tool. A tool that can be used masterfully, or misused horribly.
What we see today with the controversy surrounding AI in writing is merely a restaging of the same play we have seen countless times before. Mark Twain bought a Sholes & Glidden Type-Writer in late 1874. He became one of the very first authors to adopt the machine and famously submitted what is considered the first typewritten literary manuscript to a publisher, his 1883 book Life on the Mississippi. This put him at the cent
Plus ça change? (Score:2)
People call AI training "theft." Historical reality check: The legendary Library of Alexandria was the original non-consensual dataset scrape. Around 240 BC, Ptolemy III made the library the world’s knowledge hub through pure imperial muscle:
(1) Mandatory Port Seizures: Customs raided every docking ship for books, returned hurried hand-written copies, and kept the originals.
(2) Deposit Fraud: "Borrowed" Athens' master play scripts with a massive silver deposit, then forfeited the cash to keep the orig
Plagiarism is a Skill (Score:2)
Kids are so lazy these days. Back in my day, if I was trying to plagiarize a paper I found on the Internet and pass it off as my own, I would at least go through the effort of restructuring it a bit before submitting it. You don't need to bother trying to have an original thought, but show a little bit of effort and rearrange some sentences, maybe throw in some synonyms, switch up some grammar. Maybe add some commas where they shouldn't be to throw them off even more. Glad to see that at least some skill is