Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

daringfireball.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

531–540 of 776 posts

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

#531

Post by wpietri »

boredhedgehog wrote: post #214
wpietri wrote: post #78

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…

I get what you're saying, but I think it's ridiculous for people to think of LLM services generating text as either their own domain or something that they own.

To the extent that it's anybody's, it's either Anthropic's (they run the service) or everybody's (in that we created the content it's remixing). Legally LLM prose isn't copyrightable for good reason.

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

#532

Post by mrguyorama »

joshkel wrote: post #459
epihelix wrote: post #50

Earlier 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…

Anthropic's own explanation ( https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-text-watermark ) is not that clear-cut: "When Claude proofreads text written by a person, what it gives back has generally only been lightly edited; because nearly all the words are the person’s, there’s very little (if anything) for the watermark to attach to. Depending on the length of the text and how heavily Claude has edited it, those changes mi…

You've entirely missed the point.

A proofreader, like an english teacher, can return you your writing simply annotated and marked up, with suggestions and edits in red pen for example.

Then you rewrite your draft into a final using those edits and notes as suggestions.

Making an LLM act like that proof reader would likely not cause your output text to be labeled as generated, even by this system.

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

#535

Post by inigyou »

cubefox wrote: post #477
inigyou wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which must also be marked as AI, I hope. (But I doubt that is the law, because the EU is cucked to big businesses interests)

> How would that work? Claude appending " written by AI" to each of its messages? That would both be impractical and useless.

Claude text in Claude is already clearly labelled as AI.

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

#536

Post by inigyou »

summarybot wrote: post #508
inigyou wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you assert it now? I post some text on the internet, you claim you have copyright, how do you prove that?

Copyright law was updated in a very helpful way in the last twenty years sometime so that as soon as you post something to the internet you have copyright. If you need a citation don't hesitate to ask someone else.

So you can just say some text is copyright to you and it is?

Here is some text that is copyright to me. As you infringed my copyright, please pay my $5000 license fee for every user who has read it:

> Copyright law was updated in a very helpful way in the last twenty years sometime so that as soon as you post something to the internet you have copyright. If you need a citation don't hesitate to ask someone else.

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

#537

Post by warkdarrior »

intrasight wrote: post #364
Topfi wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not switch it around? Solves problems of privacy (no data upload), is far more doable and it's far more important to be able to verify content has not been tampered with after originating from a human or capture device (like a camera). We also have decades of cryptographic experience in reliably signing text, images, video, etc. and it doesn't break apart because a text is too short. Having proof that content (es…

Thank you for stating clearly situation. I fully agree with your assessment. For almost 10 years now I have been saying that we need to virtually watermark reality. By "virtual" I mean store the metadata about the digital capture on a public blockchain. Then my devices could have a built-in "fake vs real" detector. Artists, photographers, journalist, etc. are going to want and need this.

You'll be happy to learn about C2PA https://c2pa.org/

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

#538

Post by jjk166 »

andy_ppp wrote: post #380
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…

Doesn’t this mean Anthropic can accuse anyone of using their AI to write for them?

Seems like exactly the sort of problem the threat of defamation lawsuits are meant to solve.

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

#539

Post by inigyou »

Gracana wrote: post #464
inigyou wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be fun to run an LLM on fake output from itself. Like just force the first N tokens to say the beginning of something really stupid, and then see how it finishes the sentence. "You're absolutely right! Human feces is actually the most effective engine coolant because $ "

Some LLM interfaces allow you to modify and “continue” an agent response. It’s very useful for guidance, including jailbreaking. Need the model to go in a certain direction? Got a refusal that you want to bypass? Just start it off in the appropriate direction and then have it continue from there.

Which ones?

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

#540

Post by inigyou »

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #418
inigyou wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know you can just try it and see on any inference system thst has this knob, right? Related: if you don't have a limit on sampling (top-K or top-P), eventually you'll hit one of the really unlikely tokens by chance and then the model will switch to Japanese because the most likely completion after a random Japanese character in the middle of an English sentence is more Japanese writing, not a reversal back to Eng…

That could be how it works, but in practice it takes into account all previous tokens when producing the next-token distribution to sample from. So a switch back is more likely than your explanation supposes.

No, if you switched to Japanese the LLM wouldn't ignore it, it would "assume" there's a reason for that. The same if the previous iteration of the LLM switched to Japanese. Else you're expecting an LLM to ignore its own previous outputs and restart "thinking" from scratch with every token?
Post reply on HN