Discussion - Claude is secretly watermarking your text, and it is almost impossible to remove

How do you watermark text? If it's a Word or Google doc, it could add all sorts of invisible crud. But they claim it's part of the text itself and survives copy/paste, even editing.

I am skeptical.

So all the AI-dependent would-be writer must do to remove the watermark is this: screenshot the AI-generated text, use an Optical Character Recognition app to open that screenshot and generate its own copy of the text, copy and paste that text into a new document, save it, and no more invisible indelible AI watermark. Will take about thirty seconds.

Er, this is not a visible watermark, that should be very clear. Since the only way to remove it is through heavy text alteration, it's clearly a pattern generated through the placement and spacing of characters and punctuation.

Paste into Notepad, check for odd text, delete, copy the rest, paste into word editor.

And running the text through an OCR program to read that text would strip all this fancy formatting out.

It's like a cipher weaved into the text, if I say "Do you want to go to england or france" you know if there are blank or blank it generates maybe if x number of times whenever you have OR it can select to mark it that the first letter of the first option england in this case is alphabetical order from france. Except like way more complicated to where you have all this non impacting micro decisions for grammar and order and punctuation that add up to say, this was made by claude by anything trying to decipher it as a claude product. No way to strip it out without knowing the algorithm.

Nope. As mentioned by another commenter above, it's a cipher, one that will retain its integrity unless the text itself is edited.

So if it's invisible but I take a screenshot of that text, which includes everything visible yet not invisible "ciphers" what happens to that invisible cipher once I take my screenshot? It's not there anymore.