AI text watermarking is not a big deal

People are pretty unhappy about Anthropic’s recent announcement that they’re planning to include a hidden watermark in Claude model outputs. Will this lead to a mass exodus from Anthropic models? Will the introduction of watermarking be a meaningful change for users? No. AI text watermarking is not a big deal. It doesn’t make the text worse, it doesn’t make AI outputs more detectable in practice, it doesn’t violate user privacy, and everyone’s going to be doing it by 2027 regardless. Watermarked text is not lower-quality There is no meaningful difference in quality between watermarked and unwatermarked text. I wrote about this more here, but the two popular ways to do it — Google’s SynthID-Text and Meta’s TextSeal — are completely transparent to the user. They work by replacing the pseudo-random logit sampler with a different pseudo-random logit sampler. Suppose you were gambling on coin flips with your friends, and instead of flipping a coin you decided to do this: Check the current…