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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

#281

Post by voidUpdate »

soVeryTired wrote: post #272
voidUpdate wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

To that point, given a corpus of writing from person A and another from person B, I have no doubt it’s easy to train a classifier to determine who wrote what. In fact I believe law enforcement agencies already have these classifiers. The only difference here is that Anthropic is actively trying to make the watermark undetectable.

They're not trying to make the watermark undetectable, that would defeat the point of a watermark. They're making it detectable, but not make the text obviously watermarked

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

#282

Post by bonzini »

chii wrote: post #274
ghrl wrote: post #246

My biggest concern is that checking any text for watermarks requires sending the entire text to Anthropic. And even that is not sufficient, as the text might have been generated with ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Mistral, ... So every check requires sending the text to as many AI providers as offer a watermarking detection API, almost all of which have a very dubious track history with obtaining training data through illici…

> blindly trusting they won't train on any of that being allowed to train on any data that you can legally obtain ought to be a right for anyone. After all, i am allowed to learn off anything i can legally read (and perhaps even illegally read). The only thing not allowed (rightly so) is to produce a copy with enough similarities that it can be replacing the original.

It's a bit different when "training on any data" means basically storing a lossily-compressed copy of that data, that could be spit out years later if the model decides to do so.

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

#283

Post by NitpickLawyer »

dofm wrote: post #77
Gigachad wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the author is just mad people will be able to detect and filter out their AI slop writing in the future.

This is not it, no. He is not using AI and it is not I think remotely in his nature to surrender that control. He is engaging with this on principle. Again I am not sure I agree with him, but then it’s a hypothetical because I am not going to get an LLM to write for me either.

> He is not using AI

That's ... even worse? So we're all here in the comments trying to figure out what the author means, and what their overall point is, while clearly they don't even use the damn thing? Oof... What a waste of time for everyone involved.

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

#284

Post by rcxdude »

Gud wrote: post #280
chii wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> blindly trusting they won't train on any of that being allowed to train on any data that you can legally obtain ought to be a right for anyone. After all, i am allowed to learn off anything i can legally read (and perhaps even illegally read). The only thing not allowed (rightly so) is to produce a copy with enough similarities that it can be replacing the original.

Why would that be a legal right? Why should we hand over even MORE power to the owner class? In a fantasy world this could be possible yes.

Copyright (or any other such restriction on free use of information) creates power for owners by the simple fact that it turns information into something that can be owned.

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

#285

Post by floki165 »

If precise word choice and nuanced phrasing are the core priorities, handing off the writing process to an autoregressive model in the first place defeats the purpose. Using LLMs as a sounding board or for structural review avoids watermark exposure entirely, it only becomes detectable when someone is copying wholesale blocks of model-generated text.

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

#286

Post by redfloatplane »

carlosrg wrote: post #270

Gruber shows here that he really doesn’t understand the basics of how LLM text generation works. It’s weird he picked this battle about the quality of writing in LLMs. Was he planning to use LLMs to write his articles? Well, not that weird actually. He just has a hard-on against anything that comes from the EU since Apple got in trouble. If the EU said tomorrow that they want peace in the world he’d be in Fox News th…

Yes, I decided to stop reading his blog relatively recently after some extremely hot takes on EU policy. I don't feel his thoughts on the matter are particularly well-thought-out, and I feel like he's just stanning for Apple from his priors rather than from any grounding in reality.

I dunno, I guess that's what you should expect from Gruber but these EU-bashing articles lowered the enjoyment I got from his blog underneath the bar for me.

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

#287

Post by m12k »

Gud wrote: post #280
chii wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> blindly trusting they won't train on any of that being allowed to train on any data that you can legally obtain ought to be a right for anyone. After all, i am allowed to learn off anything i can legally read (and perhaps even illegally read). The only thing not allowed (rightly so) is to produce a copy with enough similarities that it can be replacing the original.

Why would that be a legal right? Why should we hand over even MORE power to the owner class? In a fantasy world this could be possible yes.

We don't hand over more power to the owner class by making fewer things ownable.

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

#289

Post by juggle-anyhow »

Gud wrote: post #280
chii wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> blindly trusting they won't train on any of that being allowed to train on any data that you can legally obtain ought to be a right for anyone. After all, i am allowed to learn off anything i can legally read (and perhaps even illegally read). The only thing not allowed (rightly so) is to produce a copy with enough similarities that it can be replacing the original.

Why would that be a legal right? Why should we hand over even MORE power to the owner class? In a fantasy world this could be possible yes.

Make it a right, then companies/universities will think twice before using said APIs. Instead of this grey area where we will never know.

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

#290

Post by soVeryTired »

voidUpdate wrote: post #281
soVeryTired wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To that point, given a corpus of writing from person A and another from person B, I have no doubt it’s easy to train a classifier to determine who wrote what. In fact I believe law enforcement agencies already have these classifiers. The only difference here is that Anthropic is actively trying to make the watermark undetectable.

They're not trying to make the watermark undetectable, that would defeat the point of a watermark. They're making it detectable, but not make the text obviously watermarked

Undetectable by a human reader. Come on, give the post a charitable reading.
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