Comment by VCFundedGenYer

4 days ago

Claude watermarks are a farce and a waste of time. It's hilarious to me that they burn cash to even entertain the idea.

Any attempts they use are defeated by a text editor and CTRL SHIFT V. Unicode characters are no new thing.

Reminds me of how people tried to argue that NFTs aren't anything more than just jpegs.

You misunderstand how Claude watermarks things.

  • TFA is talking about C2PA, a regular signature in the meta data. A lack thereof means nothing, but if it's there, the false positive rate should be near zero.

  • Most critics of watermarking have no idea how it works. Yet there are valid arguments against (and for) it, but they prefer to be misleading

  • Yes, but I also think it will be trivially by-passable if you pass your output through another LLM. At least for text.

    It might help catch students cheating, but not real spam-bot usage. As soon as platforms start checking for watermarks spambots will add anti-watermark passes.

    • I read through their earlier announcement, i don’t think it’ll be trivially by-passable without distorting the original message.

      I would agree it may not help spam-bot usage, however at this case seemingly the only user detection is likely an id/badge check, which is not good.