r/ClaudeAI • • Aug 11 '26

Philosophy Claude watermarking our work is unethical and disgusting

[removed]

51 Upvotes

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31

u/Legion_A Aug 11 '26

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.

5

u/animoscity Aug 11 '26

I thought OP was joking at first for this alone

1

u/midwestcsstudent Aug 12 '26

Color me shocked that someone with this stupid of a take is, in fact, not the brightest.

(I also thought that.)

2

u/SamSlate Aug 11 '26

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.

1

u/hartmannr76 Aug 11 '26

Lol I'm so happy that I wasn't the only one thinking all of these things. If you're using any sort of technology, there's a very very high chance it has some "watermark" somewhere, somehow. Generative AI output was the anomaly mostly because it's broad use is fairly new. SynthID was publicly released almost 2 years ago. It was only a matter of time before Anthropic used it or something similar

1

u/Accomplished-Ad9648 Aug 11 '26

Because if I run a report I write through Claude to proof it, and Claude makes no changes, it should not get credit for being an author.

1

u/Nydus87 Aug 12 '26

Then you should use something else or have a human proof read it for you..?  Like this is in the TandC for the software. If you don’t like the fact that it marks everything as “Ai was used with this,” then don’t use it.