221–230 of 776 posts
> "The exact words we choose when writing matter." Then write your own damn text if you care about the exact wording so much
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).
Indeed.
It's frankly bizarre to see the assumption to the contrary being made by someone who's been passionately blogging by hand for years, who also happens to be responsible for the notoriously vague, humanistic, DWIMmy Markdown standard.
> "The exact words we choose when writing matter." Then write your own damn text if you care about the exact wording so much
What an absurd take on a very reasonable concern. As much as I hate “obviously AI” writing, I don’t understand why we have to handicap the tech and prevent it from improving. This manipulation of word choices virtually guarantees AI will always sound like a robot.
How is this supposed to work in an actual lawsuit? Will Anthropic offer some sort of tool / (paid?) webservice to check for watermarks using that "secret key", and a judge is supposed to just believe whatever that tool's verdict is? And then it takes the EU another 20 years to understand what a silly idea this was?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 own…
Any potential "slowdown" doesn't even come close to making the list of top reasons people get upset about DRM.
> "The exact words we choose when writing matter." Then write your own damn text if you care about the exact wording so much
What an absurd take on a very reasonable concern. As much as I hate “obviously AI” writing, I don’t understand why we have to handicap the tech and prevent it from improving. This manipulation of word choices virtually guarantees AI will always sound like a robot.
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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…
> which inherently compromises quality. I don’t see how this follows? Tokens are chosen randomly. If you choose tokens with a different RNG in the same distribution, you’re still getting equally good or bad tokens.
Writing has rhythm, or at least it's supposed to, and synonym swapping compromises it.
Never mind metaphors and similes, which are even more tightly constrained.
LLM writing is still a long way from good. Sometimes you get lucky with the odd line, but there's a difference in quality between influencer slop, genre fiction, and literary fiction and/or best-in-class journalism.
LLMs are still somewhere between the first two, and nowhere close to approaching the third.
I was bulding a small interpreter and writing an article in ~markdown yesterday with Fable. And while it codes like a pro, it writes like a sixth grader.
Let's see how these watermarking stats hold up if/when llms start writing well.
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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…
Where is the problem with using LLM generated text? You could use your own hypothetical house elf to do it for you, or pay someone to do it. LLMs are just cheaper for a certain set of problems. People will find ways to circumvent this, so this limitation will only hit the technically less adept people.
In the fact that you didn't write it.
> You could use your own hypothetical house elf to do it for you, or pay someone to do it.
Yes, and those would be similarly problematic (and more expensive).