posted in Technology
Anthropic’s ‘Watermark’ Text Adulteration in Claude Is a Perversion of Writing
daringfireball.net/2026/08/anthropics_watermark_text_adulteration_in_claude_is_a_perversion_of_writingposted in Technology
Anthropic’s ‘Watermark’ Text Adulteration in Claude Is a Perversion of Writing
daringfireball.net/2026/08/anthropics_watermark_text_adulteration_in_claude_is_a_perversion_of_writingSounds like someone wants to pass slop off as their own work product.
If they aren’t heavily editing, the text will be full of tells anyway. I don’t think anyone is passing slop off as their own for long. They either use it a little bit and edit it enough to obliterate any markers and tells (which is fine, imo), or they are going to be discovered.
Replying to @MagicShel@lemmy.zip
I don’t think anyone is passing slop off as their own for long.
There was a recent study that showed that people preferred AI writing to human writing.
The gist of the study is they took published short stories and prompted AI to write a comparable short story. They then presented the stories to a group of people, sometimes telling them which were AI written and which weren’t, but sometimes they intentionally lied and said the human-written story was AI written and vice versa.
People prefer AI written stories, and unsurprising, if they have a negative view of AI, they’ll rate stories they think are AI as worse, even when it’s not actually written by AI.
They also performed a test to see if people could differentiate between AI and human stories, and people could only tell ~45% to 50% of the time. Essentially a guess.
Now, being better at writing short stories doesn’t necessarily mean better at all forms of writing, but I think people who aren’t using AI have a mental snapshot of the capabilities of AI at some point in the past and assume AI hasn’t improved further since that mental snapshot was taken.
the GuardianAI-generated stories rated better quality than human-written ones, study findsResearcher says simpler writing by AI is easier to read and digest, but this does not mean human authors are obsoleteIt’s very noticeable the majority of people who are anti ai have at this point years out of date views on what llms can do and what your avg joe thinks about them.
There’s plenty of reasons to legitly hate ai. But its amazing how frequently I see someone hate on so for something that got solved a year ago. Be cause their only interaction with it is the cheapest form of ai, and typically a very out of date model on top of it.
It’s like people judging a modern car as if it’s a 1920 rust bucket.