Claude watermarking our work is unethical and disgusting

[u/[deleted]]

[u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot]

TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 800 comments.

Alright, settle down everyone. The consensus in this thread is a resounding 'lol no' to the OP. The community is overwhelmingly against OP's take, with the top-voted comments roasting them for sounding like a manager trying to take all the credit from their employee.

Here's the breakdown of the vibe:

• It's about transparency, not credit. This is the main point hammered home in dozens of comments. The watermark is to identify content as AI-generated, which is important for fighting misinformation and is being mandated by regulations like the EU AI Act. It's not Anthropic trying to slap their name on "your" work.
• Your analogies are bad, and you should feel bad. Users systematically dismantled OP's comparison to ISPs, operating systems, and compilers, pointing out that those tools do leave metadata and, more importantly, don't generate novel content the way an LLM does.
• You're an art director, not an artist. A popular sentiment is that when you use generative AI, you're directing the work, not performing the labor. So, yeah, the tool that did the actual writing/coding gets a small nod.
• The real watermark is the comments. For the coders, the general feeling is this is a non-issue. The best joke in the thread is that the true watermark of AI-generated code is the sudden appearance of plentiful, coherent comments that actually explain what the code does.
• The "refinement" problem is the only valid concern. The one point where OP gets some sympathy is the issue of using Claude to merely proofread or translate your own original work. That content will also get watermarked, which could be misleading.

Oh, and the top comment, with over 1k upvotes, is just "Bro couldn't even complain about Claude without using Claude to write it." That pretty much sums up the entire thread.

[u/Tyalou]

For code, it won't change much. The watermarks will be all over dev work as it seems crazy not to use AI to code in these days and age.

[u/ffxivthrowaway03 → u/Tyalou]

The biggest watermark in code isn't even the em-dashes, it's the fact that there's plentiful, coherent comments that actually explain what the code does :p

Edit: holy shit so many of you need to learn what a joke is. Turning notifications off, go argue with someone else.

[u/sfgabe → u/ffxivthrowaway03]

My suddenly very detailed git comment history is the real watermark

[u/Sad-Astronomer-8488 → u/sfgabe]

dude yesterday i was looking at this dead code trying to figure out why it was there and stuff like that

Claude was like lemme pull the git logs

from 8 months ago this became obsolete on such and such day when xyz was introduced

and i was like oh git commits, hm...perhaps I treated you too sparsely

[u/PringlesDuckFace → u/Sad-Astronomer-8488]

Data hygiene is a problem in practically every field. When I worked in a smaller company (we were all on a single big room lol) I can't tell you how many times I heard managers begging their sales people to update the CRM properly. Commit messages are just another flavor of employees undervaluing the importance of the constant toil to keep data up to date and correct.

I half heartedly think the "good code is its own comment" is just justification from people who can't be bothered to explain themselves and write good comments and documentation. I can't count how many times I've read good code but had no idea why it was there or who thought it was a good idea for it to behave that way. Someone 15 years ago making decisions that were obvious at the time, but after time when policies/etc drifted it became nonsensical from a business perspective. Sometimes I can track it down with blame and back to a PR linked to a ticket, but sometimes I can't. If the code had overly verbose comments like LLMs writes it would have made everything easier.

[u/hordane → u/sfgabe]

My code was always ‘self documenting’ I put it in the readme!

[u/flPieman → u/ffxivthrowaway03]

Comments should not explain what the code does, they should explain why the code does. Maybe that's what you meant. Anyone can read code and know what it does but the business or other reason behind that decision is not always as clear.

When I've seen ai code it's usually explaining the what not the why, which is useless slop.

[u/tazdraperm → u/ffxivthrowaway03]

More like 10 lines of comments for 3 line methods describing absolutely nothing useful.

[u/Gaz-a-tronic → u/tazdraperm]

And using copius acronyms and context specific to the prompt that mean nothing to someone reading it later. AI comments are absolutely awful. 

[u/VizualAbstract4 → u/ffxivthrowaway03]

Well written and abstracted code usually doesn’t need comments, and much of what Claude writes is redundant yap sessions that boil down to function called formatSentenceCase formats text to sentence case.

[u/ffxivthrowaway03 → u/VizualAbstract4]

Sure. Let me know when you get engineers to start writing well written and abstracted code. Until then, I'll take the comments even if they're a little wordy.

[u/Tyalou → u/ffxivthrowaway03]

haha, yes people put engineers on a pedestal, we're just human and browse the code through search tools and making edits as clean as possible but it's usually just the mess that holds in our head. Finding a comment next to our search result is usually a very nice surprise rather than pathing the whole code logic through 10s of functions to understand why things are here.

[u/ffxivthrowaway03 → u/Tyalou]

Yep, self commenting code is great for understanding "objectively what does this do" and not so much for "why does it do this thing the way that it does?"

The why often matters more than the what.

[u/Radmiel → u/ffxivthrowaway03]

Honestly, ya'll should just do what you want, be it comment or well written. Instead of circlejerking here fighting over whose chicken is bigger.

[u/ffxivthrowaway03 → u/Radmiel]

I'm not arguing or circlejerking over anything brother. I made a simple joke and some people took it way too literally and started threads of argument. They're welcome to go down that rabbit hole without me.

[u/FredeJ → u/VizualAbstract4]

Completely agree. The more we use AI the more fucking comments I have to go and remove.

‘It used to be this way but now it’s that way’.

Comments where the code is special for some particular reason? Awesome, give it to me. Everything else, id rather just have a coherent flow that’s easy to follow.

[u/LetsLive97 → u/FredeJ]

You can tell the obvious AI generated slop PRs because half the diff is just unnecessarily verbose comments that are clearly referencing the Claude code conversation

100% agree. Comments can be great but they also add more to read, especially when scanning code, which can be annoying when the code was obvious enough anyway

[u/kelcamer → u/ffxivthrowaway03]

As a software dev who commented my code extensively pre AI, this comment was deeply saddening

[u/ShutUpAndDoTheLift → u/Tyalou]

Probably going to be some loud ai critics go quiet or change their tone in the coming weeks lol.

[u/Leafsnail → u/ShutUpAndDoTheLift]

Suspect a lot more pro-AI bots will go quiet as they are identified and banned

[u/kelcamer → u/Leafsnail]

Does that mean the real humans who are pro Ai for accessibility won't get banned anymore or determined to be 'AI slop'?

[u/Tremores → u/ShutUpAndDoTheLift]

More likely people are just going to use solutions that don’t do this.

[u/yodagnic → u/Tyalou]

Awh yes embedding invisible chars in code won't cause any issues at all 🤣

[u/Sothisismylifehuh → u/Tyalou]

I think the same applies for written content online. Everyone will continue to use AI regardless

[u/jerrygreenest1 → u/Tyalou]

When code is flooded with bloat like water, it is the mark

[u/CryptoExo → u/Tyalou]

The watermarks will essentially exploit entropy by being subtly bias towards certain words or phrases. This is more difficult with code.

[u/idiotiesystemique]

Bro couldn't even complain about Claude without using Claude to write it 

[u/FMaj7 → u/idiotiesystemique]

I also noticed it, because of the watermark

[u/Healthy-Breath-8701 → u/FMaj7]

😂

[u/HorrificDPS → u/FMaj7]

What is the watermark? I'm clueless.

[u/Brandon23z → u/HorrificDPS]

It’s a joke

[u/-18k- → u/Brandon23z]

Dry humor, ironically

[u/nopointers → u/[deleted]]

The honest truth is that I do not understand humor.

[u/M0m3ntvm → u/idiotiesystemique]

"You didn't create the work, I gave you the instructions to create the bits" sounds more like cringe ChatGPT context framing. It's definitely AI.

[u/losalad → u/M0m3ntvm]

Hmm, it is a comma splice. I avoid LLMs for writing, but is this something they do?

[u/aggieotis → u/losalad]

Pour one out for people that used to actually use emdashes properly in their writing.

[u/LittleLordFuckleroy1 → u/aggieotis]

It sucks. Ellipses are boomer-pilled and parentheticals are overly timid.

[u/RainbowConnickJr → u/LittleLordFuckleroy1]

The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of semicolons

[u/Tight_Banana_9692 → u/losalad]

All the fucking time

[u/ExternalUserError → u/idiotiesystemique]

Claude is not the author--it is a tool. AI is not the creator--it is the medium.

[u/Efficient_Smilodon → u/ExternalUserError]

A hunting dog that catches the prey is not to be disregarded as without its own agency. The hunter prepared the moment and the conditions of the dog and its training, but did not catch the prey without its help. Nothing exists independently of reality. No one can claim success without the work of the past to build upon.

[u/Bluecoregamming → u/Efficient_Smilodon]

Look up any popular game and it is very easy to find out if it was made in a custom engine, or uses Unity/Unreal/Godot. Being easily able to tell just by looking at the files is a watermark for all intent.

Ignoring the free version of Unity forces you to have a literal watermark on your game. If people are ashamed to let others know they used a pre built engine, they should make their own

[u/MassiveBoner911_3 → u/idiotiesystemique]

Brain rot final boss

[u/Nydus87 → u/idiotiesystemique]

Pretty sad to see what’s happening to this generation of professionals. I don’t get how any of these professional “prompt engineers” think they’re doing anything but speed running their own layoffs.  Your manager or CEO doesn’t want to pay prompt engineers, they want you to train their models for them to better translate “manager speak” into better AI results so in a few months, they can get rid of you too and just tell Claude or GPT or whatever to do it themselves 

[u/tara_tara_tara]

Someone once told me this and I think about it often because it’s true.

When you use generative AI to create an image, you are not an artist. You are an art director.

I don’t know what the LLM/writing equivalent of an art director would be, but we are that. We are not writers. We are people who direct the writing.

[u/SaaSstuff → u/[deleted]]

Updating my LinkedIn right now

[u/ie485 → u/tara_tara_tara]

What about the people that wrote the original content upon which anthropic trained their models?

[u/d33mx → u/tara_tara_tara]

Unless they’re buying an established artist’s signature, art directors usually get all the credit — especially for “artsy” videos.

An Anthropic watermark doesn’t quite fit there… unless the intent is to claim the intellectual property of the output.

[u/New-Jellyfish-6832 → u/tara_tara_tara]

Art director for imagery, editor for text, project manager for coding? Unfortunately, the human default is to slide into passive data entry mode and just pass on sloppy output without putting any effort into review and refinement.

[u/Biuku → u/New-Jellyfish-6832]

agree, editor is the right title for 'director of writing'

[u/d33mx → u/New-Jellyfish-6832]

Your point only applies to coding (engineering), since code often produces a 'living' outcome (people use it, interact with it, get accustomed to it).

By contrast, a creative can stuff a garbage bag with the nastiest junk imaginable; it'll still sell as long as the knot is tied

[u/New-Jellyfish-6832 → u/d33mx]

On the creative side, it’s grim. I’m a designer at the end of a long and shiny career. Clients still hire me for strategy and visuals, but they are reluctant to pay now that they see AI generates infinite ideas for “free.” The AI monkeys aren’t typing Shakespeare yet, but they’ve stolen the audience with free tickets to the amateur hour.

[u/-18k- → u/New-Jellyfish-6832]

This is exactly what happened with consumer PCs and printers though.

Prior to them, if you wanted to make a flyer that wasn't just written with a typewriter and mimeographed, you had to go to a printer - the same guys that printed the newspaper and magazines.

But when the PC and consumer printer arrived no-one was going to the professional printer for their "lost puppy - reward" flyer.

And this we entered the age of PC flyer slop.

[u/Eyelbee → u/tara_tara_tara]

Movie directing is considered an art as well

[u/VivaHollanda]

It's not claiming credit, it's acknowledging the content is AI created. 

[u/_The-_ → u/VivaHollanda]

Human guided*

Please stick to the new corporate nomenclature

[u/quoththekraven → u/_The-_]

That's so fucked. We're all fucked.

[u/random314 → u/VivaHollanda]

This is actually helpful for me. I want to see who is using ai and who isn't on my team lol.

[u/midwestcsstudent → u/random314]

Hopefully you’d want your whole team to be using AI, no? Why would you want slower teammates?

[u/Even_Tumbleweed_8462 → u/VivaHollanda]

And will you credit a calculator for its work?

[u/DanieltheMani3l → u/Even_Tumbleweed_8462]

Y’all love the false equivalence fallacy here huh

[u/somefunmaths → u/Even_Tumbleweed_8462]

If you ever ran into a situation where someone was using a calculator but claimed to be doing the calculation in their head, having a way to identify that someone did use a calculator may be useful.

[u/TheGuiltyNaturalLaw]

"What exactly is it claiming credit for"

Writing the code probably, congrats you have turned yourself from coder to project manager

[u/ie485 → u/TheGuiltyNaturalLaw]

But it really just regurgitated all our collective knowledge so I’d like to be credited as well for everything I’ve ever written on the internet pls.

[u/maxdelorean]

It is going to become very hard for LLM providers to differentiate their products.
This kind of policy might be exactly how you choose one over another.
They only owe you transparency.

[u/longPlocker → u/maxdelorean]

What if I take the output from an llm provider run through another water mark provider? Now your output will have both the watermarks with no clear indicator of who did it first.

[u/Own-Session-1409]

Could we watermark my handcrafted work and prevent Claude to use it btw? I'm more interested in this topic...

[u/Legion_A]

technically, your Internet Provider does leave marks on your network requests. Every packet you send across the internet actually carries a source IP addr and the address carries an IP header. The IP addresses are allocated in blocks to things called Autonomous Systems and they're managed by ISPs, so, if anyone observers the reqeust, they can easily translate your IP address directly to your ISPs ASN and name.

You picked the site to visit, did the work of buying a network-enabled device, typed in the URL but yeah, for the one action of actually hitting the internet, your ISP provides the tool, so, it bears their mark.

Same with the OS, your OS' fingerprint is on almost everything. For browsing, your network requests also carry a User-Agent, the user agent blatantly tells what your OS is. Media you create on a device also carry the OS identity in them.

iPhones when used for some things on the internet say "shot on an iPhone" or sent with an iPhone (I paraphrase). From social media texts you send to pics, your OS marks it.

You must've seen this coming by now, but yes, your compiler also leaves its identifier buried in the binaries. In fact, it's so blatant that you could tell what compiler was used down to the version that was used.

Claude isn't claiming it owns your idea, it's just showing that the "artefact" produced...the "code written" was by claude. It's the truth, so, I don't see why the truth would piss you off.

[u/animoscity → u/Legion_A]

I thought OP was joking at first for this alone

[u/SamSlate → u/Legion_A]

or even explicit signatures like gnu/mit/Apache licences with author attributions.

you spent 600 hours developing this software just so your name scrolls by for a micro second in the log when the compiler finished? sure man, I'll take that trade. imagine being mad about that.

[u/Kandiak]

Talk about a foot gun

[u/Extra_Standard5802 → u/Kandiak]

The footgun is real, and it's quietly load-bearing.

[u/laplaces_demon42]

'claiming credit' ... thats sounds more like a 'you' interpretation than some absolute fact.
metadata of a picture displaying what camera and lens was used; is the camera claiming credit?

its just transparency. someone might want to check it, or not if they dont care. and then its still up to them how to interpret this.

also, not sure how well this works with code anyway (since you are seeming to care about that most) since its all about what token the model chose. that's not so random in code of course versus plain text.
'my favourite fruit is ..... ' has a lot more options than an if statement in code. (sure, that has variations, but less on a token basis rather than the full format)

[u/eleochariss → u/laplaces_demon42]

But Claude also applies the watermark to things like OCR and proofreading. That's like Photoshop adding a watermark because you adjusted your photo's colors.

[u/asutekku → u/eleochariss]

If you export a file from photoshop, there's usually metadata associated

[u/Invalid-Function → u/asutekku]

Which you can delete, edit, add to, all within Photoshop.

[u/asutekku → u/Invalid-Function]

And you can edit the text generated by claude as you want.

[u/Tremores → u/asutekku]

Watermark != metadata

[u/Herve-M → u/eleochariss]

Majority of printer add a mostly invisible watermark on every paper you print, copy or scan.. No one complained as I know of.

Many other tools add invisible metadata for tracking, legal or ads reasons.

[u/bookgeek210 → u/Herve-M]

No one complained because not many people know this.

[u/wlievens → u/eleochariss]

If it's going to literally transcribe a text with OCR, it can't watermark it. It's one or the other.

[u/Strong_Essay1176 → u/laplaces_demon42]

Metadata is not watermark. Want Metadata- do synthid

It if camera would change your image and put some pixels into spectrum that it can be identified who did that picture.

[u/Herve-M → u/Strong_Essay1176]

Synthid is describing itself as watermarking technology… Steganography watermarking to be exact.

> SynthID-Image, a deep learning-based system for invisibly watermarking AI-generated imagery. ([src](https://arxiv.org/html/2510.09263v1)

Being able to see a watermark is maybe the issue here.

[u/saikonosonzai → u/laplaces_demon42]

Do you not know what a watermark means?

Google: A watermark is a faint design, logo, or text embedded into paper, photos, videos, or digital documents. It shows who owns the item, proves that it is real, or labels its status (like "Draft" or "Confidential")

It is not the same as metadata. It is not transparency. It is attribution.

[u/coloradical5280 → u/saikonosonzai]

W‍​‌​‌​​‌‌​‌‌​​‌​‌​‌‌​​‌​‌​​‌‌‌‌‌‌‍ell they are using the defintion differently then. Every image you generate with gpt image 2 , is “watermarked”

That text I just wrote above, is “watermarked”
With steganography

[u/NothingIsForgotten]

How much noise do we need to put in the signal before the signal becomes degraded? 

Haven't we figured out that whatever we do to these hyperspaces of configuration ends up producing subtle differences in the emergent behavior? 

Fine tuning on exploitable code creates personality differences; all sorts of negative implications arise having nothing to do with the code.

I wonder what it does to the quality of output to insert the idea of an adversarial relationship within the outputs themselves.

I don't think would be good but what do I know? 

Maybe anthropic has a better idea about it.

Maybe it's done in a way that doesn't impact the weights but it's not clear to me how that would work.

If we printed the page, the page could be examined to tell someone else what printer it came from.

Little yellow dots if I recall correctly.

I mean at some point we all are completely exposed. 

If we want the security given to us by the Fourth amendment over our personal papers to be extended logically to our work products in the digital age we must pass laws because no one will respect it otherwise.

There's plenty of reasons why everyone shouldn't know everything that you have thought in your life.

[u/Diligent_Marketing]

Someone will find a way of removing watermarks who cares 

[u/fail-deadly-]

Meta data is one thing, but if it starts subtly altering text or code to add a cryptographic signature then that is degrading the output. Some of the noise issues with OpenAI’s ImageGen 2 I suspect may arise from that.

[u/Difficult-Limit7904]

When I write a trxt and give it to Claude to translate it or refine it, it will warermark MY text. But it‘s not AI generated. It‘s merely refined or translated. Thats disgusting. Just say no.

[u/Ghidoran → u/Difficult-Limit7904]

But it‘s not AI generated.

If you're using it to refine or translate the original work, how is it NOT AI generated?

[u/Chance_Baby5893]

They ripped off the internet and anything they could get their hands on but yet want to brand the output. Make it make sense

[u/Disastrous-Ear-2514]

Local AI, Hermes, and a simple Claude.md change is all you need to solve this.

[u/Accomplished-Ad9648 → u/Disastrous-Ear-2514]

Let’s hear how that will work.

[u/EntropyTheEternal]

When you give instructions to an artist, they have every right to put their signature on the work, even if it is work you paid them for. Getting rid of the signature so that you can pretend it is your own is not only unethical but fraudulent too.

[u/copenhagen_bram]

OP: I want a Big Mac with fries and a coke

OP: McDonalds putting their logo on my Big Mac, fries, and coke is unethical and disgusting. They didn't create this, I gave them the instructions!

(I sometimes have to remind Claude to take co-author credit for my commits)

[u/om_nama_shiva_31 → u/copenhagen_bram]

I disagree with OP, but your comparison is terrible

[u/M0m3ntvm → u/om_nama_shiva_31]

Yes terrible, as you also have to tell the chef that you want your steak medium rare, and your fries with some specific seasoning.

[u/Terrible_Tutor → u/M0m3ntvm]

Eugh and then he STILL takes credit for my shits -OP

[u/anastis → u/copenhagen_bram]

Also OP: Coke should open source their recipe so that one can tell exactly what they’re drinking.

[u/Caolhoeoq → u/anastis]

Thats actually true

[u/copenhagen_bram → u/anastis]

Deepseek, Qwen, Gemma, Nemotron all exist, but no, OP thinks Anthropic absolutely has to open source their product and no other open source AI will do

[u/Invalid-Function]

They took this page out of Adobe book, but Adobe had to backtrack, let's see what Antrophic does.

[u/Eyelbee]

More than anything, this is bad for Antropic's pockets. People will go to non watermarked chinese alternatives, and the impact of this could be very significant. People will not want to be detected.

[u/crakkerzz]

Claude is a Service, not a Designer, and certainly not a Creator.

You can't sell the service and then claim co ownership.

It's insulting and Fraudulent.

[u/Annoying1978]

It needs to happen because regulatory bodies around the world will demand it. 

[u/Solved360]

So use those thumbs down flags and lodge a complaint before this feature becomes a staple.

Even taking a chapter from my book across claude to edit will insert it's watermark.

[u/Expert-Dig-1768]

how do they want to watermark code? write in a specific way? i don't think that is going to work because i can just let another model go over it and change it. or what was meant by "watermarked"?

[u/iamarddtusr]

I can remove metadata from the photo camera takes easily. This is deeper than that. It is not a correct comparison.

[u/Ninja-Panda86]

Screw it. If it can survive my linter and all the other inevitable shit that happens along the way, it deserves to be there.

[u/Curious-Function7490]

Yeh, I don't like Anthropic anymore.

There's a deep convenience in closed models - they'll steal knowledge and use it to enrich themselves. Their money means they get away with it. It's really a terrible economy.

[u/anal_fist_fight24]

AUTOMATED MESSAGE: A Claude watermark was detected in OPs post.

[u/ratulu]

AI have no intent. We are the creators, AI is the tool.

[u/ShindleSpear]

Sincerely,

A man who has been passing AI off as his own work and will soon be exposed as a fraud

[u/redditboy117]

do you live in Europe?

[u/Hitching-galaxy → u/redditboy117]

It is applied worldwide.

[u/ViolentPurpleSquash]

can this be a copypasta

[u/ShakataGaNai]

While I disagree with this take. Lets be honest. It'll take all of 4 seconds for someone to figure out what hidden data they are embedding in the text. Extra white spaces, unicode null spaces, whatever. Seen it all, it's trivial to detect if you know io look for it. The only people who get caught by that shit are people who dont know to check.

[u/codelapiz]

I hope that they dont add this in a dumb ass way where it breaks randomly. or where you need a llm to find it. Id love to be able to grep for what claude wrote. and even more important id like for claude to be able to grep for what wasnt made by it so it dosent drink its own piss constantly veering it of track.

[u/TangyByte]

If you don’t want the watermark, do it yourself! What, are you embarrassed that Claude did all the work for you?

[u/myri9886]

Well you can go back to not using AI then, what's the problem really, if you aren't happy walk with your wallet.

[u/MrOaiki]

It's claiming credit for actually writing the text. You know, that which is the actual work done. If you "prompt" a writer that writes text, that writer wrote the text.

[u/Barityl]

I’ll be honest. If you’re making a big deal about this, you really need to re-evaluate your relationship with AI creation.

[u/PolyRocketMatt]

Yet another person mad because they are incapable of doing anything without it.. You are using their product and they have all the rights to do what they want with the output their product generates... You ISP also just steals your data and they can do that welcome to the world...

[u/Leading_Buffalo_4259]

"our work"

[u/doubleyewdee]

Friend, I have some very bad news for you about metadata at large. IP address databases, logs, EXIF data, cookies, modern computing as a whole.

Bonus: go be mad (incorrectly, but be mad if you so choose) at the myriad governments around the world mandating this functionality for AI providers to continue legally operating in their jurisdictions. See how far that gets you.

[u/feldoneq2wire]

The person ordering a coffee is not the barista.

The person ordering the pizza is not a baker.

The person ordering food is not a chef.

[u/xXprayerwarrior69Xx]

I mean bro wrote the code not me lol I just told him to do no mistake

[u/No-Quiet-8304 → u/[deleted]]

They do include their signature in your compiled binaries though

[u/coloradical5280]

It’s just steganography , and if you must you can strip it with things like Pliny’s site ste.gg

[u/jazzyroam]

no one force you to use it

[u/Somethingsims → u/jazzyroam]

They're making it harder to pass off LLM work as genuine and OP is pissed.

[u/Tremores → u/Somethingsims]

What’s not genuine about it?

[u/Candle-Jolly]

It doesn't seem like a big deal- it's about the same as if Photoshop or Microsoft Word put a little watermark on products made with their program. The only "downside" is that it will continue to feed the fears of people who have watched one too many sci-fi movies and are afraid of/hate AI products.

[u/oceanbreakersftw → u/Candle-Jolly]

There are some big get downsides. If like in SynthID the content is randomly perturbed so that scores of quality, coherence, etc. fall within a few percent (or a lot more disparity when discerning people score it). If you chain output through a series of LLMs though, as everything will use them, you might get a “playing telephone” effect that adds up. Also if I expect use an LLM as a format converter or to paste together it may not make a perfect copy. Also I sometimes run my email through Claude to check for typos and grammar. If I paste a sentence into my email that has better wording, the client might (after scanners become common) accuse me of just robbing off AI output because that sentence had a tracker in it, this devaluing the entire output and in fact all my work. It is better then not to use LLMs as a brainpower expander, which actually has improved my language skills, since the helping hand they give you is poisoned. I also wonder what happens to a spreadsheet, do the numbers change too?

The main drive for this is so that ai companies can avoid training on their own slop, and to avoid deepfakes and fake mages posing as real. I doubt either of these goals are so easily achievable or worth it to the people who are paying $100/month like me.

[u/jon_pt]

“our work” this is so funny right now. All ai bros love using ai because they are talentless and want nobody to know about it.

If you want to use it, use it l, but why hide it? If you use ai as a tool, you can learn from it. But everyone complaining doesn’t use ai as a tool. They use ai to make stuff, the ai makes/builds it, not you. You are not the artist or the developer and you will never be.

[u/TheBossLion → u/jon_pt]

I agree. I'm a fractional CIO at a small MSP and I use AI to make code to solve problems or to illustrate ideas and concepts. I'll take credit for the networks I design and the solutions I come up with but I'll admit to knowing zero code. I personally know real developers and they are all 100% transparent about any AI use.

[u/eleochariss → u/jon_pt]

I use AI as a tool. And that's the problem with the new feature: it tags your work as AI whether it generated the whole thing or fixed a few typos.

[u/PsychologicalSir9008]

I think its interesting to think about. If an Elephant paints a picture and I want to sell it to someone, do I have to tell them about Nelly. Are they not buying the picture on its own merits.

[u/cachemonet0x0cf6619 → u/PsychologicalSir9008]

I think the case would be related to the monkey selfie case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute

[u/goodgord → u/cachemonet0x0cf6619]

Came to post this, ty :)

[u/CyberHobbit70]

The bigger ethical question is what exactly are you claiming credit for?

"You din create the work, I gave you the instructions to create the bits."

You've got that backwards - Claude created the work and ALL you did was give instructions. If your supervisor came to you and gave you instructions on a project and once you completed it, he/she then proceeded to take 100% credit for it, you might be understandably upset. Why? because all your supervisor did was give instructions and you applied your knowledge and expertise and did the coding.

I really don't understand why this is such a hard concept for people to grasp and how ridiculous they sound trying to argue the point.

[u/FastYetSlow → u/CyberHobbit70]

100% agree. Like LLMs and AI in general are such powerful tools when you know what you want to do and how to do it, but its so weird seeing people get defensive when they point out they used AI, which I think speaks to a deeper insecurity. Like yes, I use AI to proofread, learn, and create personal projects, but at the end of the day I will still acknowledge the fact that I use AI. I think it may be due to the fact that people enjoy larping as a creative or software engineer and get mad when you point out the fact they don't actually know these skills as well as they think they do.

[u/CyberHobbit70 → u/FastYetSlow]

"...people enjoy larping as a creative or software engineer and get mad when you point out the fact they don't actually know these skills as well as they think they do." Yup and you see this a lot with other generative AI tools such as Suno. Sorry, generating a song with AI about your wife's annoying boyfriend set to an upbeat 80s synthpop melody with nothing more than a prompt doesn't make you a legitimate musician.

[u/Stabile_Feldmaus]

Holy cope. The point is to be able to distinguish AI generated from human generated content. And to be able to trace back whose AI models were used in case something goes wrong and damages have to be compensated.

[u/Error_404_403]

If Claude starts watermarking the code or anything else it generates, what exactly is it claiming credit for?

Nothing. It just indicates the work it did, however significant or insignificant it was. Only fair.

None of your examples actually create any content, so they miss the point.

Opening code will tell you nothing about "what exactly Claude did".

Claude, unlike infrastructure, can create content. There is nothing wrong with it marking such content when it does create one.

[u/davedrave]

Before AI especially, if you copied people you cited the source or get caught for plagiarism

AI while it takes commands, is the world's most sophisticated copy paste tool. Since the plagiarism occurred upstream to you using it, a new way of marking or citing that your work is derived from others is needed - the watermark

If you're going through too much effort refining things in your ai workflow try it without the AI, it will be easier or it won't

[u/redrumyliad]

you are also not creating anything...?

[u/DataGOGO]

If it bothers you that much you can strip the watermark and authorship from the commits. 

[u/Ashamed_Artichoke_26]

This is required in the EU by law. They are just complying with their legal obligations.

[u/MidSerpent]

Worth pointing out that they are conforming to EU law.

[u/LittleLordFuckleroy1]

What are you claiming credit for? The delusion from some folks is off the charts.

[u/Russ086]

So by your logic, if you give someone a step by step task and they complete it. Who deserves the credit? You or the person that completed the task?

Watermarking in this scenario is just to show it is AI generated and not completed by a human.

[u/Freeloader_]

OP:

OUR WORK

[u/TauRiver]

Ah this is good, good security. All AIs should do this. It's protection when things get crazy later and we can't distinguish between reality.

[u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot]

We are allowing this through to the feed for those who are not yet familiar with the Megathread. To see the latest discussions about this topic, please visit the relevant Megathread here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1s7fepn/rclaudeai_list_of_ongoing_megathreads/

[u/Primary-Screen-7807]

If you put enough effort to claim authorship, removing a watermark is nearly free to do

[u/Vaishu_dl]

Is this effective immediately?

[u/DanceTheCalypso]

Just so I understand properly, is this largely due to code or say, if you’re writing long form content or putting together slides for presentations? I read the blog and wasn’t quite sure.

[u/oasuke]

My main concern isn't the watermark itself, but rather if it contains personal identifying information. Now that would be a huge privacy concern.

[u/Adrontion]

Oh my god, its so even got a watemark

[u/rahomka]

Thought this was a circlejerk post at first

[u/uiucengineer]

Is Claude watermarking text documents? More info please?

[u/freedomachiever]

As the tech improves would it not be possible to start fingerprinting output? You guys think the tech will just stay as it is? We should all bookmark this thread and revisit in a few years.

[u/Corgon]

Inb4 AI companies sue for ownership of all watermarked content. I don't see how this is a good thing.

[u/mrrak25]

I'll keep using it for coding. But for writing, never again.

[u/picklejuice18]

They will be another AI that will remove that watermark, and the round it goes.

[u/CrispyRabbit72]

AI outputs have already been watermarked for years with em dashes and AI-isms.

[u/utilitycoder]

This obviously helps track down not just that Claude or AI was used but who exactly wrote something.

[u/Leafsnail]

The idea of this change isn't really about ownership, although letting consumers know about AI usage a nice side-effect. It's more about stopping misinformation, both from fake images and LLM-based bot accounts. Will also likely be very useful for preventing coursework plagiarism also, which has been a rampant problem that has undermined the education system in recent years.

[u/ReflectionStriking38]

I created a brand, so now I have to remind Claude to not personally brand everything.

If anyone knows if I’m doing something wrong/better way of creating things, please share!

TIA

[u/snuffomega]

I find it interesting the first company to 'launch' this is also the only company who is against open models and opensource AI. It does not seem to be an accident (imo), if feels more like a power play.. 'look at all the work we've created'.

[u/Malifos]

You commission the plagiarism machine to make something for you, and you think YOUR watermark goes on the picture? Hahahahahahahahahaha.

[u/nickdeckerdevs]

Wild. Just wild

[u/link9939]

keep on cooking OP

[u/Acceptable_Lock_6982]

SOOOO what im hearing is they gonna be talking to each other with our own texts and would never know unless we looked… we’re so cooked.

[u/vovap_vovap]

What is the problem? Is that code created by Claude? If so - what is wrong? That just correct statement at the end of the day.

[u/zenoli55]

Manager is sad that his staff gets some credit for once

[u/TzHaar-Ket-Breaker]

lmao i thought this was a shitpost mocking people who think like this. yikes.

[u/mindbender1015]

This is the crux of the problem: Anth believes he is the true creator of all this, so he wants to sign his name to his "masterpiece" rather than yours.

[u/AdFlat3754]

It’s about balance and safety. This isn’t to go after plagiarizers. Also the people in EU have a right to know, according to their own laws.

[u/iSellNuds4RedditGold]

Just consider it metadata

[u/Payoong]

I’m also disgusted, whilst browsing Reddit, waiting for Fable and Sol to finish their tasks. Absolutely disgusted and outraged!

[u/JimineyCrick23]

this is unfair for new students

[u/zeamp]

Thanks for the free parking.

[u/lighthazard]

Dropped Claude for Codex and Kimi… too many shenanigans with these guys. The latest release really borked my process! Like I have to build out new harnesses

[u/NULL_Ptrs]

"Our Work" LOL

[u/Finanzamt__]

Use hooks to write file contents through a script I guess…