Embarrassingly Simple Text Watermarks
Ryoma Sato Yuki Takezawa Han Bao Kenta Niwa Makoto Yamada
We propose Easymark, a family of embarrassingly simple yet effective
watermarks. Text watermarking is becoming increasingly important with the
advent of Large Language Models (LLM). LLMs can generate texts that cannot be
distinguished from human-written texts. This is a serious problem for the
credibility of the text. Easymark is a simple yet effective solution to this
problem. Easymark can inject a watermark without changing the meaning of the
text at all while a validator can detect if a text was generated from a system
that adopted Easymark or not with high credibility. Easymark is extremely easy
to implement so that it only requires a few lines of code. Easymark does not
require access to LLMs, so it can be implemented on the user-side when the LLM
providers do not offer watermarked LLMs. In spite of its simplicity, it
achieves higher detection accuracy and BLEU scores than the state-of-the-art
text watermarking methods. We also prove the impossibility theorem of perfect
watermarking, which is valuable in its own right. This theorem shows that no
matter how sophisticated a watermark is, a malicious user could remove it from
the text, which motivate us to use a simple watermark such as Easymark. We
carry out experiments with LLM-generated texts and confirm that Easymark can be
detected reliably without any degradation of BLEU and perplexity, and
outperform state-of-the-art watermarks in terms of both quality and
reliability.