John Gruber criticizes Anthropic's text watermarking as a perversion of writing

ArtificialOther · x · 2026-08-17

John Gruber criticizes Anthropic's implementation of text watermarking in Claude. While Anthropic claims the watermark is "imperceptible" and doesn't change text quality, it actually works by manipulating word choice (steganography) during inference. Gruber argues this violates the essence of a faithful tool and distorts writing.

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