AI text tools can’t watermark text output

“Not sure what EU regulators really expect here. There's no way to watermark plaintext that can't be circumvented in a few seconds with even very simple methods. Anybody with a Claude/Codex subscription can build their own "unwatermark text" webapp in five minutes flat. (And if Claude/Codex refuse, that's what Mimo and DeepSeek are for...)The risk is that the quality of output, in terms of word choice and style, will decline.”

Here's how I explained it earlier: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1x06m4a/comment/pelhvqh/ Basically every word of the output is part of watermark. It could be complete different way to choosing how to express it, not just indidual…

“I heard about this and I just thought to myself...what the fuck are your priorities if you have to focus on watermarking instead of ya know...fixing the alignment problem [re: AI generated code copyrights]”

Watermarking?

Citation? The paper I read from Google claimed otherwise.

Ironic, EU has no AI companies, but strongest regulations

No, because the distribution stays the same!

“Sure but then the word gets disproportionately used so you can run statistical analysis on the output and not need the hash.”

“OpenAI published its plan for marking ChatGPT text on October 5, and I read the whole post. My take is that for most people here nothing changes this month, and for people in the EU it changes quietly. The scheme is called textGrain. It adds no hidden characters. It nudges which words the model picks, and a detector with the right key looks for that pattern, so copying the text or running a Unicode cleaner leaves the mark in place. Eligible ChatGPT and Codex users in the EU get it over the comin”

I guess I will just use local models to unfuck the text you fucked.

If they mark anything of mine i will stop using them.

“I'm glad they showed benchmarks to prove it doesn't degrade output. Though they better be 100% sure about that or people will quickly notice if only Europeans get the watermark. At least Claude has watermarks for everyone, worldwide. I mean, it isn't even a bad thing to have. I usually don't agree with the EU's strict regulations, but the watermark is just a good idea as long as it doesn't have a negative impact.”

“Doesn't have watermarks at all. Can you try it again?”

“Does ChatGPT leave watermarks on all text output it produces? I am doing an excel with ChatGPT instead of writing everything myself, saves me time but I obviously still need to check everything. In my circles using AI (even when allowed such as in this case) is heavily frowned upon so I do not want it to be traced submitted by /u/Novelle_plus [link] [comments]”

“I will never forget this quote: “They distilled all the value of intellectual property everywhere." After Claude embracing watermarking and openAI doing their thing perhaps more people will turn to local hosted, I hope https://reddit.com/link/p8kvq4g/video/6qwh23hvuboh1/player”

“If you're using the web interface, Ctrl + Shift + V pastes it as text instead of an attachment.”

“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.”

Is that only for exact word for word copying?

“It's not really about how it looks, but how it is organized based on headings. If you set the font bold and larger, is not the same as setting it to H1, so the parser understands what's the title, what section it is and what can be found within the section. Open the document tabs. Notice that the chapters and subchapters are automatically set up, and you can easily navigate the document to each section? That's what the headings are for.”

“There are several paragraphs where output looks very AI-like (and Claude flavored one at that), e.g.> In other words, “generated locally” does not mean that the complete operation is local. Microsoft receives and moderates the prompt, then issues the unique GUID that Paint embeds into the locally generated image. Paint also sends the previous promptGenerationId as lastPromptGenerationId with its next moderation request, allowing successive requests to be linked explicitly.> That relationship is”

“> AI-generated text warningThis seems incorrect to me. Are you basing that on the use of bullet points?”

“I recently implemented a minimal, educational version of SynthID-Text-style watermarking for language models. I saw anthropic post about how they'll start adding watermarks to their model responses and it made me very curious as to how they'll do it and what do they even mean by watermark here. Like will we start getting random ads or something in the middle of model responses or what. Then decided to read their article and found out that watermark is not a visible message at all. It is”

“This is like giving you three outputs from md5sum and asking you to guess for which one the input ended in a "q". There's no way to tell unless you break the RNG.”

“I think the branding of "watermark" will be offputting for a lot of people, particularly since most people won't read enough to learn what it actually means.”

“That would be impossible to monitor. If you lean heavily on Anthropic software, you could generate the text and quickly feed it into another software tool like Gemini, Deepseek ChatGPT for reformatting. Or any other LLM. Edit: Okay, I just realised that it would be much harder for the user if it's being used to detect coding. But for general text such as literature, I still think it would be impossible to regulate.”

“This is real, not speculation — Anthropic confirmed it in a support post. Worth noting a couple things that get lost in the outrage cycle though: the watermark is applied by the model itself embedded in word choice, not tied to your account, so it can't identify you specifically, just that a Claude model wrote the text. It's also explicitly driven by the EU AI Act's transparency rules (Article 50), not some voluntary surveillance move, and it applies globally because they don't h”

“Anthropic has explained how its new AI text watermarking system works. Newer Claude models can embed an invisible machine-readable watermark directly into generated text. Anthropic says the marking can travel with text when it is copied and pasted, and the system is being applied worldwide. The interesting part is that this isn't a visible “AI generated” label. The watermark is embedded through the model's word choices. I can see the argument for it: as AI-generated content becomes harde”

“So Claude made the news recently for watermarking its output. I got curious and pasted some AI text into a hex viewer to see what was actually in there. Turns out there are two completely different things going on: Invisible Unicode characters — zero-width spaces and friends, literally hiding in your text. They survive copy-paste and end up in your Google Docs, emails, wherever. Statistical watermarks — the SynthID-Text stuff from the news, where the model's word *choices* form the pattern.”

“Short answer: yes, it can be removed. Long answer: you’d have to heavily edit your text, though. Alternatively, use open weights models on your own hardware. submitted by /u/dragosroua [link] [comments]”

“You're right about that distinction. Hidden Unicode and formatting artifacts are not the same thing as a provider's model-level watermark, and finding them does not prove AI authorship. The current tool handles the literal artifacts people can inspect and remove locally. Provider verification is kept as a separate result and will only be enabled when an official verifier is available. I should make that distinction even clearer in the headline and first-run explanation. Thanks for callin”

“This is not how the "AI watermarks" people are worried about work. If you're genuinely curious, below is a great summary (not by me, it's just so good I keep it bookmarked lately). Removing them is not about "hidden Unicode characters" or formatting artifacts. https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1vli2wm/how_the_watermark_for_generated_text_actually/”

“> I made the counter argument that watermarks would find their ways into everything and eventually be bound to attestation.Yup.Elsewhere in another front page thread today: "oh but apps blocking screenshots because of 'sensitive content' can be bypassed by taking a photo of your screen with another phone".Any tech-savvy person with two brain cells reading this and that: "gee, I wonder if the same magic imperceptible watermark that survives multiple rounds of cropping and printing and scanning, t”

“1. As watermarked text is added to the training data, watermark-related tokens will be associated more with AI outputs and thus lower quality outputs which will hasten model collapse. Especially because every provider has its own secret key and they are all training on eachother's outputs anyway.I guess they can at scale filter the watermarked documents (by necessarily allowing eachother to at scale checked for watermarks, but banning the labs not part of the watermarking-cabal). Makes me wonder”

“That’s my point of the post … I had the feeling that the English text editing skills of Claude went significantly down in August.I was frustrated at first not knowing what they are doing.After I read this post, (seeing they introduced it in August) I think it has to do with the watermarking.Try it on a paragraph … the connections between sentences feel clunky now.I will play with it more and see if that’s really the case (the watermarking making the text edits worse).”

“I needed another reason to cancel my Claude sub. Thanks Anthropic!This is akin to adding a giant watermark on things one would made with a free product "Made with XXX". Except you're paying $200/month for it, and there's no way to disable that watermark.I don't disagree with EU regulations, but I strongly believe the onus should be on the content publisher, not the toolmaker. If the toolmaker watermarks whatever his tool produces, it opens a giant can of worms that cannot be closed. That means a”

“I've been curious whether you can kill an Claude's text watermark just by editing (not "rewriting/rephrasing") what it wrote. And so I built a Claude/OpenAI/Gemini text-watermark generator plus a detector and threw a bunch of attacks at gpt-oss-20b and Qwen outputs to find out. The technique relies on the famous Tournament Sampling built upon standard Gumbel-max sampling. It turns out almost everything people assume works, doesn't. Swapping em-dashes for hyphens, stripping”

“What is even the point of watermarking AI slop supposed to be? All it does is provide people with the false implication that anything which is not watermarked must not be AI-generated.I struggle to see how this could possibly be useful unless there's some sort of psy-op going on to trick people into uncritically accepting anything lacking a watermark as not being AI-generated.”

“Idk if it depends on what I do or how I ask, but I lost an original picture and I only have the one with a watermark and it won't let me take it out. What can I do? submitted by /u/sannleikur [link] [comments]”

“We use a method of watermarking that does not have any practical impact on the quality or content of Claude’s outputs; The difference between watermarked and un-watermarked text will not be distinguishable to readers; Nothing is added to the text and there are no hidden characters; Watermarking doesn’t require extra tokens, and will not be more expensive; Watermarking carries no identifying information and can’t be traced to a specific person, organization, or chat; Watermarking won’t be specifi”

“Interesting. Here's the section of the EU Act that mandates this:> Providers of AI systems, including general-purpose AI systems, generating synthetic audio, image, video or text content, shall ensure that the outputs of the AI system are marked in a machine-readable format and detectable as artificially generated or manipulated. Providers shall ensure their technical solutions are effective, interoperable, robust and reliable as far as this is technically feasible, taking into account the speci”

“What do you think? Can/will Google detect Claude’s invisible watermark—and does it affect rankings? Will it help Google more with Scaled Content Does a watermark prove Claude wrote the content, or only that it processed it? Will the watermark survive copy-paste, CMS publishing, and human editing? Does watermarking change the real SEO standard: helpful, original, accurate, experience-led content? Should agencies change their AI-content workflow, disclosure practices, or editorial QA because of it”

“[Claude] ★ 1/5 (v1.260813.0) — ATTN: Even if you just use Claude to edit your own work, it will leave a permanent watermark flagging all of your content as AI! This is absolutely absurd. I previously subscribed to the Pro plan but have cancelled because of the decision to watermark content that I have created using Claude as a tool. There’s a certain audacity to Anthropic watermarking AI generated text when it fails to credit the human minds that were fed into its models in the first place.”

“That's assuming Claude's algorithm is public and consistent. It's kind of like Claude's guardrails. Sure you might find a way to circumvent a guardrail, but it will constantly be updated, making it cumbersome to find the solution”

“I assumed it was so they could detect ai written content then exclude it from training new ai”

“Truth is that it is also easy to remove unless someone manage to have everyone on board, literally all world must agree "yes I am not going to reshuffle a bit because AI act is great"”

“For sure the kids using AI to do their homework are not going to put much effort into hiding the fact. But people using AI for search manipulation, political influence or scamming are much more invested. And I expect they are going to quickly realize that they can avoid watermarking by using providers that don't do it or switching to local models entirely.”

“No, the algorithm doesn't require this. It semi-randomly (depending on the secret key and the prior N tokens) makes half of the tokens slightly more likely than others. This is all. You don't have to run the model on the text again. Then you can check that there is a higher than random number of more likely tokens.”

“lmao at the idea of needing cryptography to identify slop, this article is obviously full of it”

“Yes, in theory, because your local model if its any future one will re-watermark it.”

“The article addresses this at the very end. Using the analogy of slack, it says that code doesn’t have enough slack for the watermark to function.”

“Looks like all of the big ones are likely using DeepMind’s SynthID: https://deepmind.google/models/synthid/”

Thanks for replying and the information given. Appreciated!!

“It’s supposed to be, by law https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/code-practice-ai-generated-content”

submitted by /u/johnnyApplePRNG [link] [comments]

“To quote the original article's context more fully:"The output of chat tools (and most of the output of AI agents) is not containerized text, but plain old regular text, and so can’t be signed. What would it even look like to sign ChatGPT outputs? There’s no artifact to pass around."I'm reacting to the idea that "plain old regular text" can't be "signed" because they aren't "files". I'm observing that you can sign a stream of text, and probably other metadata, no problem. To my reading this real”

“The watermark is embedded into the word choice that the AI outputs and it is not something that can be removed with a copy-paste. How it works is that it splits all words into two categories, let’s call them red and green, and rewards the model for using “green” words. The divide between red and green gets reshuffled after every word (it uses the previous word as the seed of the shuffle). Human written text will end up with roughly 50% red and 50% green while AI written text might be >90% gre”

“Bingo. The watermark would definitely be in some form of rich text as opposed to using the word pineapple three times. Given all of the different things that people prompt Claude to do it would be almost impossible to have a word or even punctuation that stood as the watermark. And even if I tried to use something like the em dash there will be easy for people to figure out and just find and replace.”

“I believe it already does and has been. There is just no way to detect it on our end yet.”

“[Claude] ★ 1/5 (v1.260806.0) — Adding watermarks to a paid product is ridiculous. If I’m paying for a subscription for use of this product, I would want no watermarks in any of it in the text in an embeds now if this becomes just a free service that we all can use as much as we want for free water market up. Also their monitoring of your usage is a bit too heavy handed with regards to saving your inputs for 30 days with fable product and eventually I would imagine it’s going to come to the rest”