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_writing
Sounds 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 obsolete“Because we’re human, we tend to personify AI and imagine it as some kind of glowing robot with a benign and neutral face, when it’s really just predictive code based on a massive stolen database of actual writing, physically based in vast, expensive and destructive datacentres with catastrophic repercussions for the surrounding communities,” he said.
Kennard also stressed that AI was not a “tool” similar to spellcheck or a thesaurus…
A very valuable comment compared to the author of OP’s article who simply seems entitled to this cloud service?
And now Anthropic is saying they’re going to make it worse, on purpose, for purposes that do not benefit me in any way? Even if only slightly worse?
Get fucked.
I’m sorry, was this reply meant for me? I don’t see how it fits as a response to my comment.
Yes. I was quoting some insight from the piece you linked, so it seemed appropriate to reply to your comment here.
I don’t mean to be dense, but can you elaborate on what point you were trying to make in context to my comment? I still don’t see what it has to do with what I said.