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Comment by VCFundedGenYer | Hacker News Reader

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VCFundedGenYer·

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.

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You misunderstand how Claude watermarks things.

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.

Imagine telling someone they're wrong without providing any evidence or context.

Welcome to the internet.

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

What are the valid arguments against? Is it about the fact that the output isn’t “optimal”?

Rather, concerns related to user identification combined with copyright issues

I don't believe it, but I still haven't seen any in-depth discussions on these issues

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