this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2026
166 points (96.1% liked)
Technology
87146 readers
3756 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The year is 2027. A beginner programmer searches how to access the last array element in a programming language she is unfamiliar with. The results come in. "Top 10 array accesses that will make you want to buy our sponsors product". She sighs and asks Claude instead. She pastes the one-liner into her code. Finishes the remaining code. Tests. Double-check. Commit. Push. A notification appears. "Your account has been temporarily suspended for violating GitHub's terms of service". Forgot to mark claude as a co-author. She sighs again
These watermarks require the text to be long-ish and not too edited from the original. I didn't see this explained in the article, but I only skimmed it. The press release from Anthropic goes into it, without giving many details.
I'm guessing it's going to embed a pattern with punctuation and word/letter choices, so there will need to be a sufficient amount of text to ensure its actually the watermark and not just dumb luck.
Yeah it’s exactly a pattern with token choices, by introducing a statistical bias to the randomness in token generation. Quality isn’t affected because the model is still choosing from the best candidates for the next token. You’re right that to be effective they need a long enough input to get enough matches to be.
Computer code is also going to be less effective because code has a much more rigid structure dictated by language syntax rules, coding conventions, linters and formatters, etc.