> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://theindex.site/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # For Journalists, AI Watermarking Is a Reason to Ditch Claude - URL: https://theindex.site/for-journalists-ai-watermarking-is-a-reason-to-ditch-claude/ - Published: 2026-10-15T15:50:20.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-15T15:50:20.000Z - Description: I use AI. But a recent change has me looking for open alternatives. - Author: Brad Keoun - Tags: Opinion, Issue 03 I use AI for newswriting almost every day, relying on major platforms including Claude and ChatGPT. It’s a real confession, because for many journalists, AI newswriting is a hard no. They see writing as a core skill of the profession. How you could actually end up with great stories if you turned over the sacred act of penmanship to a machine? Based on my experience as a user of the tech, I have come to agree with the analogy that AI is to writing what the calculator is to math: We’ll learn it in school, and after that, we’ll let the tool do the work. But here's where I draw the red line: AI text watermarking all over my precious copy. If you haven't been following this issue, I don't blame you because there are like 17.4 gazillion headlines about AI every day, many of them exhilarating and terrifying and often quite mind-numbingly technical. Text watermarking, adopted by Google for its Gemini AI app in [October 2024](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08025-4?ref=theindex.site), is the practice of using complex mathematical formulas to statistically skew how an AI picks the words that go into a piece of writing. Basically, the AI can choose specific synonyms for various words in certain spots, and then anyone who has the key can detect the statistical pattern and thus conclude that the piece of writing carries a watermark. Anthropic, maker of Claude, [announced](https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-text-watermark?ref=theindex.site) Aug. 14 that it would start applying watermarks to generated text, using a technique similar to Google's SynthID. OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, followed suit with a similar [disclosure](https://openai.com/index/eu-text-provenance/?ref=theindex.site) earlier this month. Both firms said they were implementing the text watermarking to comply with EU rules on "transparency of AI-generated content" that took effect in early August. As OpenAI put it in a [blog post](https://openai.com/index/eu-text-provenance/?ref=theindex.site) on the matter: “Provenance can help people and platforms assess potentially misleading AI-generated content, including deepfakes. We pair these signals with policies, abuse detection, reporting, investigations and enforcement, and work with researchers, standards bodies, platforms and civil society to make provenance useful across the wider ecosystem.” Those might seem like worthy objectives, but most journalists would rather stay in full control of what they publish. Which may sound weird given we are talking about AI newswriting. The point is that, as journalists, we need to do these things on our own terms. The Fourth Estate, as it were. Here is a hypothetical scenario: What if Claude were somehow co-opted by a government, political party, or corporation and started leaving watermarks all over my AI-generated newswriting? As I mentioned before, you shouldn't publish unless you've checked everything. But if my published copy carries this AI firm's specific watermark, then I imagine it would expose my work to claims I was biased, owned, controlled, corrupt; you get the point. We've all seen this type of stuff on social media; sometimes it's completely paranoid and made up, often by people who simply don't like what's being reported. In an era when politicians are quick to label coverage they don't like as "fake news," why would I want to offer another attack vector? Another way to think about it: As a pro writer, I want the BEST word in every instance, not a word that an AI firm's algorithm might substitute because it deems the synonym equivalent. What if I had programmed my AI to toss in a brilliant turn of phrase every once in a while, and it came up with something brilliant, and then here comes the watermarker to obliterate the literary touch? (Anthropic acknowledges that the watermarks can be eliminated through heavy editing.) > **In an era when politicians are quick to label coverage they don't like as "fake news," why would I want to offer another attack vector?** What if speechwriter William Safire's famous phrase, "nattering nabobs of negativism," delivered by U.S. Vice President Spiro Agnew in 1970, were statistically turned into "nattering nabobs of pessimism." Imagine Picasso painting [Guernica](https://www.pablopicasso.org/guernica.jsp?ref=theindex.site), and his painting arm were, every so often, statistically manipulated to change the color of the brush stroke to a different blue hue that a computer algorithm considered equivalent? Would the work have been as great, indistinguishable from the one that Picasso intended? Maybe not. Would viewers of the giant painting wonder how much of the rest of it was AI-generated? (NOTE: To avoid distractions from my argument, I wrote this entire column without AI assistance.) Anthropic, in its blog post announcing the move, insisted that it uses "a method of watermarking that does not have any practical impact on the quality or content of Claude’s outputs" and that "the difference between watermarked and un-watermarked text will not be distinguishable to readers." The assurance may satisfy most writers, and most readers. But journalists are not most writers. They are a very specific class of professionals for whom great writing is critically and commercially paramount. The tool has to be optimized for writing, not for someone else's agenda. What to do about it? The simplest thing is probably to switch to using open-source models locally, which would be a way of avoiding the watermarking. While open-source models could be similarly skewed, at least they can be inspected. That's the type of transparency I want. As the founder of Distro Media, I have helped build an AI-native publishing platform that allows users to essentially replace their content management systems (notorious for being clunky and super-annoying to use) with their AI. Natural-language commands replace the nettlesome job of navigating the backend of some arcane software interface developed a decade ago. (Pretty much every journalist I've ever known has hated their CMS.) So it is in my interest to figure this out; we think this is how most journalists will work in the future, using systems like ours, and agentically newswriting all the time. (My prediction is that entry-level reporters will essentially level up to their boss, becoming the editor responsible for a team of reporting bots. Or something like that.) If journalists want to uphold their standards of neutrality and great writing, they'll have to get serious about finding alternatives to these closed AI models and platforms, which are so opaque that they are now being forced to adopt copy-besmirching practices.