AI text watermarking and quality loss

The post argues that Anthropic's claim that watermarking does not affect Claude's output quality rests on single-response human tests, while the SynthID-Text paper's supplementary material describes a "diversity/detectability trade-off" in which watermarked responses to the same prompt are more similar than unwatermarked ones. It cites a test by Natzir Turrado in which four of five watermarked responses opened near-identically, and argues this hurts retries, creative writing and repeated-prompt consensus checks.