[dead]
Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing
171–180 of 776 posts
Re: Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
It didn’t take, apparently.
It’s fully possible I didn’t explain it very well in the first place, but he is making a wider point. The point I made (quite briefly) is that watermarking is only feasible because for good writing it is necessary to use T>0, or the writing will never explore a more creative choice, and that at T=0 you don’t even need a watermark to spot LLM-generated text. The point he is making is consistent with this, isn’t it? Ei…
>Either you allow temperature to drive creativity, consistently in a way that can be influenced and analysed, or you adulterate that process for the purposes of meeting a corporate/legal directive, in a way that is proprietary and obscure
This framing does not make sense to me. What do you mean by "influenced and analysed"? How have you or anyone been influencing or analyzing the randomness behind the sampling process to create better writing? What makes the unadulterated randomness "driving creativity" but a different random choice uncreative?
Re: Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
The watermark doesn’t change the distribution, only per-token selection. I think not understanding that is the source of most people’s FUD.
There's no difference between those two things. The distribution that matters is the distribution of tokens that are picked not the distribution of tokens the LLM model passed to the selector.
On average the distribution of selected watermarked tokens is the same as the original distribution. You can test this experimentally.
I think there is a possible weakness in the context of the watermarker but that is not your claim iiuc.
Re: Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
If this is true then the probability of the detection tools flagging completely human generated text as AI generated is non-trivial. Let's say I write a completely original piece and the detection tool says there is a 36% probability it was generated with Claude. What then? Now it's up to the person looking at the score to cast a subjective judgement. Maybe to me, anything over 25% is unacceptable. Maybe to someone e…
That's an interesting problem to discuss, but unfortunately TFA spends no time discussing that.
Yeah. And the detector can’t even tell you “X% chance this is watermarked” because it doesn’t know the input distribution. It can only tell you “Y% chance that an unwatermakred text would score this high” and how many history professors understand Bayes rule well enough to understand the distinction?
Re: Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know, back in the era when proofreaders were human, I never one met a proofreader who rewrote my text afresh, rather than annotating the text with a pen. It's still possible to use Claude to proofread - highlight grammatical, flow, structure, logic errors and make simple suggestions for you to pick and choose or adapt as you wish. No watermarking will flag your text. No flaw accusations of LLM authorship will hau…
Nonsense. Forget proofreaders. Think editors. In publishing some editors practically wrote the books. And then theres ghostwriting ! Think of that!
Okay, then it should be acknowledged if a work was AI-edited-written, or AI-ghostwritten.
Re: Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing
#176Respectfully, you are all missing the point. Watermarking is bad not just because of the principled stance that your tool should not be working against your own interests (the passionate argument in TFA), but specifically because it lends credence to the idea that AI detection is a valid and possible thing to do perfectly . As technologists of course we know "oh well yes but with some confidence interval we can detec…
I suspect there’s a niche market for software that records your writing process to help you avoid being falsely accused of using AI to write.
Re: Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing
#177>I want any LLM I use to choose the very best, most precise words at every single decision point. Does the author think he is currently getting T=0 output from Claude? Is he under the impression that T=0 produces the "best" writing? This entire article just seems so detached from the basics of how LLMs work.
I think the author is just mad people will be able to detect and filter out their AI slop writing in the future.
Gruber just hates any kind of EU regulation of US tech companies ever since they started making what he calls "product decisions" for Apple.
Re: Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know, back in the era when proofreaders were human, I never one met a proofreader who rewrote my text afresh, rather than annotating the text with a pen. It's still possible to use Claude to proofread - highlight grammatical, flow, structure, logic errors and make simple suggestions for you to pick and choose or adapt as you wish. No watermarking will flag your text. No flaw accusations of LLM authorship will hau…
Nonsense. Forget proofreaders. Think editors. In publishing some editors practically wrote the books. And then theres ghostwriting ! Think of that!
Part of me wishes we had the same regulation for ghostwriting etc. Nobody should be claiming to have written a book they didn't.
Re: Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing
#179I often agree with John Gruber, but I think he’s lost the plot with this one.
The thing I don’t understand is why he seems to care so damned much about this subject--enough to write over 4,500 words on it!
John writes for a living. That’s his profession. He’s been writing for over 25 years now. When you’re that good at writing, and you care this much about your writing, you don’t allow an LLM to take over your job. I just can’t imagine that he’s in the market for LLMs and that literary excellence is his number one selection criterion.
So why is he so livid about it? It’s like being angry that wine is going to start coming in smaller bottles even though you don’t drink wine.
Even if he’s angry on behalf of other people, I don’t get it either. In my view, having LLMs write publishable content on your behalf is not a socially-acceptable use case, nor a professionally-acceptable one in most professions, even though people are abusing it for this purpose anyway. And besides, the models aren’t even all that good at it today. If you agree with that, then you certainly should not care if it’s using different phrasing than you otherwise might prefer if the meaning is similar enough.
I can't help but wonder if perhaps his hatred of EU technology regulation (which, admittedly, is mostly pretty dumb and is mainly just making life worse for users) is getting the better of him.
Re: Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing
#180This is not meant to be snarky, But almost any writing done by Claude is a perversion of writing. I honestly can't stand the way Claude writes. This watermark change just makes it scarier.
Sorry, what's scary about it exactly?