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Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing

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Re: Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing

#11
> I want any LLM I use to choose the very best, most precise words at every single decision point.

Try running an llm like qwen 3.8 27B in Q8 locally with an intentionally very low temperature setting, it will write like a caveman crossed with a robot. You may find that an extremely literal output does not look pleasant to read for humans.

Re: Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing

#12

Translation: No one can ever again use Claude for proofreading their own prose unless they’re willing to risk that the whole thing might be flagged as having been generated by Claude. I think that was intended, yes.

It is quite just, if you think about it. Human works are copyrighted and protected at the moment of creation. All rights reserved. Yet, LLM outputs are uncopyrightable. Therefore, if Claude or any AI has processed my copyrighted work, the end result is uncopyrightable and in the Public Domain. The public has a right to know: is this a human copyrighted work, an LLM PD work, or is the human falsely claiming authorship…

Perhaps LLM outputs are uncopyrightable, but derivative works of copyrighted works are not automatically in the public domain.

Re: Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing

#13
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and it says that in https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-text-watermark

I should have read that, it’s actually quite reasonable and I don’t really understand the objections in TFA having read it. > One of my fundamental problem with this is that no two synonyms carry the exact same meaning. “He leaped at the chance” and “He jumped at the opportunity” are very similar sentences expressing the same general sentiment, but they are not the same. The exact words we choose when writing matter.…

I don't understand Gruber's points either, I wonder if there is some fundamental technical misunderstanding. Does he think that the logits should be sampled from in a "pure" manner without introducing any other bias? Does he know that there's already a sampling temperature, and that most providers have probably moved on to sampling strategies other than top-k? Does he know that the word choices have already been altered irreversibly during RLHF which is how you get the obvious Claudism like "load bearing" and "seams"?

Perhaps it would be useful to publish examples of samples with/without watermark. I'd suspect that the variability from simply sampling repeated times would dwarf any semantic differences you'd detect with the watermark.

Re: Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing

#15
post #9

> I want any LLM I use to choose the very best, most precise words at every single decision point. Then bad news: LLMs already use randomness in a fundamental way. Each time they go to generate a token, they first generate a probability distribution of possible tokens. Then they pick one randomly according to this distribution. The technique described can be thought of as making the random number generator pseudo ran…

That's inaccurate in two ways:

(1) The behavior that is approximately what you describe is not "fundamental" (though it may not be something you can disable on some hosted providers), it is an option that is not fundamental (and with runtimes where you have full control can be either disabled or tuned in a large number of manners), and

(2) The actual behavior that is approximately what you describe already usually involves use of PRNG (with a user or harness supplied seed), not a true RNG; the change to do watermarking isn't going from RNG to PRNG, it involves adding an additional set of constraints on token generation on top of the existing ones, which inherently compromises quality.

Re: Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing

#17
The objection isn’t that normal sampling is somehow pure. It’s that watermarking uses token choice to carry an additional, covert signal. The quality cost may be small on average, but it is still an optimization constraint unrelated to meaning or style—and it turns ordinary prose into provenance metadata. The more serious questions are detection reliability, false positives, and what happens after human editing. https://prachub.com/

Re: Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing

#18

Translation: No one can ever again use Claude for proofreading their own prose unless they’re willing to risk that the whole thing might be flagged as having been generated by Claude. I think that was intended, yes.

I'm not sure the quoted statement is true. Proofreading like "point to problems in the text", if you fix the problems yourself and don't copy-paste the solutions given to you, should still be safe, shouldn't it? So, human-written text should not be falsely flagged if you use LLM for proofreading.

And if you copy-paste the answers from LLM, I think it's only fair the end result gets flagged. You're not writing it yourself.

Re: Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing

#19
post #9

> I want any LLM I use to choose the very best, most precise words at every single decision point. Then bad news: LLMs already use randomness in a fundamental way. Each time they go to generate a token, they first generate a probability distribution of possible tokens. Then they pick one randomly according to this distribution. The technique described can be thought of as making the random number generator pseudo ran…

I think this is a key reason why humans write better prose than LLMs - we can try to choose the best word every time, and go back and restructure sentences and paragraphs if we want.

On the other hand, LLMs are forced into picking some likely-ish word, and then have to build the rest of their response to retcon that choice into making sense.

Even good human writers would probably struggle with this constraint. It would be like someone interrupting your writing to tell you the next word MUST be such-and-such, and then you have to try and make it work as best you can first try, without going back to edit. The result would probably be a little clunky. (Maybe it’s impressive LLMs write as well as they do.)

Re: Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing

#20
Claude's writing was already easy to recognize. The fact that Anthropic complied without complaint makes me wonder if they already watermark their outputs and used the opportunity to create goodwill. Presumably they want to avoid training their new model on text generated by the previous model, so they have reasons to be able to recognize AI-generated text.
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