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.
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
#12Translation: 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…
Re: Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing
#13Earlier 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.…
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
#14Re: Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing
#15> 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…
(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
#16I honestly can't stand the way Claude writes. This watermark change just makes it scarier.
Re: Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing
#17Re: Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing
#18Translation: 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.
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> 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…
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.)