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ZDNET's key takeaways
New watermarks on Claude content are upsetting some people.
Reactions reveal company priorities and human over-reliance on AI tools.
To avoid possible watermarks, write it yourself (sorry!).
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.
How the watermarks work
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.
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