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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

#211

Post by Arodex »

allisdust wrote: post #206
voidUpdate wrote: post #199

> "The exact words we choose when writing matter." Then write your own damn text if you care about the exact wording so much

LLMs are no more than pen and paper at this point. Especially for those who aren't trying to create slop. We all would want our pens to accurately reflect the strokes (well in this case thoughts) rather than adding tiny watermarks to identify that it is generated by a particular pen or a user. Watermarking per model is just the start. The method is cheap enough to distinguish individual users.

>LLMs are no more than pen and paper at this point.

Then use pen and paper. It is the same, you say, right?

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

#212

Post by thatjoeoverthr »

dragonwriter wrote: post #15
syrrim wrote: 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 in…

1) we’re not discussing those systems. We’re discussing a chat AI product called Claude, which does not offer those knobs.

2) Claude’s PRNG having a P is immaterial

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

#213

Post by thatjoeoverthr »

nextaccountic wrote: post #182
Maxatar wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is no “oops, I wrote ‘th’ but I should have written ‘tw’ so I guess I’m stuck writing three instead of tween”. You're mixing up two claims here, and only one of these is kind of true. Yes LLMs do internally plan ahead in a way that is emergent rather than strictly part of their architecture, so that part of your claim is true. The way you word it by saying they are "coalescing the probabilities of a range of t…

Reasoning tokens are a way to escape autoregressive woes. The model can generate a draft, then ponder on it, and use this to generate a final version

They’re a way to mitigate it. It still writes like an LLM and everyone can see it.

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

#214

Post by boredhedgehog »

wpietri wrote: post #78
levocardia wrote: post #26

Crazy how a smart person like this fails to understand the gumbel softmax technique. It does not affect writing quality at all, provably. The very fact that there is generally no "best next token" with 100% certainty is precisely why the trick works (you cannot watermark a response to "respond with the To be or not to be soliloquy from the first folio Hamlet", for precisely this reason).

It seems to me like he started out mad and looked to justify it. I'm skeptical that anybody generating LLM text is really all that concerned about optimal word choice. Or even particularly good prose. But let's pretend that person exists. If that person tried, say, an open model and that same model with watermarking applied, I'd be eager to hear their thoughts on the prose quality. Especially if they built an experim…

> It seems to me like he started out mad and looked to justify it.

Yes, but that's neither surprising nor a reason to dismiss the anger. People get angry about DRM schemes in video games, even if the slowdown these cause is practically imperceptible. They're angry -- and Gruber acknowledges that factor too -- because a stranger manipulates what they regard as their own domain, without consent by or benefit to the owner.

It might be another instance of consequentialism vs. honor ethics. Many consequentialists don't seem to understand that something that doesn't have demonstrable consequences can still have moral implications.

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

#215

Post by weego »

wpietri wrote: post #78
levocardia wrote: post #26

Crazy how a smart person like this fails to understand the gumbel softmax technique. It does not affect writing quality at all, provably. The very fact that there is generally no "best next token" with 100% certainty is precisely why the trick works (you cannot watermark a response to "respond with the To be or not to be soliloquy from the first folio Hamlet", for precisely this reason).

It seems to me like he started out mad and looked to justify it. I'm skeptical that anybody generating LLM text is really all that concerned about optimal word choice. Or even particularly good prose. But let's pretend that person exists. If that person tried, say, an open model and that same model with watermarking applied, I'd be eager to hear their thoughts on the prose quality. Especially if they built an experim…

> It seems to me like he started out mad and looked to justify it.

that's been his thing since it was just a blog about apple product speculation and update. It's always been tedious.

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

#216

Post by voidUpdate »

kgarten wrote: post #210
voidUpdate wrote: post #199

> "The exact words we choose when writing matter." Then write your own damn text if you care about the exact wording so much

One could also use butterflies to write ;) https://xkcd.com/378/ The problem is, that LLMs worked very well for me to improve my writing. Especially as I'm not a native speaker, it was a great way to improve the legibility of my work. I want a tool that helps me improve my writing. A tool I can learn from. Not a tool that switches out "bananas" to "airplanes." I'm was using Claude Opus and now Fabel extensively for e…

I'll be interested to see if people can actually pick out which text is watermarked and which isn't once they introduce it. It won't switch "bananas" to "airplanes". It'll switch "I really enjoy eating bananas" to "I love eating bananas" or similar

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

#217

Post by ehnto »

allisdust wrote: post #206
voidUpdate wrote: post #199

> "The exact words we choose when writing matter." Then write your own damn text if you care about the exact wording so much

LLMs are no more than pen and paper at this point. Especially for those who aren't trying to create slop. We all would want our pens to accurately reflect the strokes (well in this case thoughts) rather than adding tiny watermarks to identify that it is generated by a particular pen or a user. Watermarking per model is just the start. The method is cheap enough to distinguish individual users.

That is an insane statement, LLMs generate swaths of text from almost nothing.

If they are adding so little value as to be as transparent as a pen and paper then why use one at all? Transcription doesn't need an LLM so that's not what you're taking about I assume.

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

#218

Post by zahlman »

kgarten wrote: post #210
voidUpdate wrote: post #199

> "The exact words we choose when writing matter." Then write your own damn text if you care about the exact wording so much

One could also use butterflies to write ;) https://xkcd.com/378/ The problem is, that LLMs worked very well for me to improve my writing. Especially as I'm not a native speaker, it was a great way to improve the legibility of my work. I want a tool that helps me improve my writing. A tool I can learn from. Not a tool that switches out "bananas" to "airplanes." I'm was using Claude Opus and now Fabel extensively for e…

> One could also use butterflies to write ;) https://xkcd.com/378/

This comparison is frankly absurd.

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

#219

Post by nicbou »

kgarten wrote: post #210
voidUpdate wrote: post #199

> "The exact words we choose when writing matter." Then write your own damn text if you care about the exact wording so much

One could also use butterflies to write ;) https://xkcd.com/378/ The problem is, that LLMs worked very well for me to improve my writing. Especially as I'm not a native speaker, it was a great way to improve the legibility of my work. I want a tool that helps me improve my writing. A tool I can learn from. Not a tool that switches out "bananas" to "airplanes." I'm was using Claude Opus and now Fabel extensively for e…

This is an excellent use case. It made learning German much easier. I write what I think is correct, then get a fixed version.

When writing in English though, I use it more like a dictionary. If you want to write past a certain level, an LLM works better as a metaphor and idiom search engine.

I also like to ask it to generate 20 ways to say the same thing. It’s a great way to simplify or smoothen sentences without losing your voice.

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

#220

Post by vrganj »

aenis wrote: post #196

The same absolute morons who gave us cookie consent strike again. I swear, one of those days I will get into politics just to fight those two things, and the cottage industry of batshit crazy lawyers that gave birth to those things.

The cookie consent banner is not the EU's fault.

It's either don't track or ask for consent. The fact that the industry chooses to track is not on the EU.

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