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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

#561
post #82
post #74

Earlier 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…

He’s not making a wider point, he’s crashing out because the EU is involved. I don’t really think it is any more complicated than that - there are no technical merits to the criticism.

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

#562
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…

Sounds like a business opportunity.

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

#563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes: https://support.apple.com/en-mk/117767

This says we can only install Apple-approved apps.

... Maybe it's localised or something?

I see a section "How to install apps from a developer’s website in the European Union". Do you see that?

(They do require notarisation, but not review/approval).

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

#564
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.

> After all, i am allowed to learn off anything i can legally read (and perhaps even illegally read). Are you a tool? Because humans gets rights, tools don't. Arguing that untrained or partially trained models should have have rights is a different argument to arguing that a trained model should get the same rights as a human.

What if I'm reading it for work? What am I but a tool for the corporatioN?

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

#566
post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Neither can I recall there has ever been a moveable type press, Ah my friend, you are about to fall down a rabbit hole into standardisation of spelling, and the sometimes deadly debates about how to translate latin into the vernacular. English, as she is written, is a great example. for the spoken word, BBC/received pronunciation is another. I speak the way I do _because_ of BBC radio. The reason I have the accent…

A radio device at BBC did all this and not humans? > again, your argument is against LLMs and globalisation of culture, not finger printing. ABSOLUTELY NOT. Do not ever put words in my mouth. My argument is that radio is a medium through which humans communicate. An LLM is not.

[deleted]

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

#567

Great question buried at the bottom: > Also, what happens if another major global market makes it unlawful for AI to secretly watermark generated text?

That is a good question

> We’re applying watermarking globally at launch because we don't yet have a durable way to scope it by region. However, we will continue to evaluate different approaches, and will share updates when we have them.

So unless they figure it out, would that 'major global market' essentially need to be the US?

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

#568

I’m surprised by the comments here being so favorable to anthropic. The comments are right about there being no “best” token, and yeah Gruber may have an agenda here. But I think the fundamental principle is that this approach messes with the distribution in ways that deviate from the trained model. Take the “gray” and “overcast” choices. And lets say before applying synthid the percentages were 48% and 52%. Those pe…

> To change those percentages to 45% and 55%

This seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of how this sort of watermarking works. (Either that, or I have a fundamental misunderstanding of how it works lol.) It doesn't change the probability distribution of the next token at all. If you were getting XYZ 48% of the time before, you're still getting XYZ 48% of the time. What's changed is where the random numbers come from. But as far as you're concerned, there's just as random as they were before, just like an encrypted message is indistinguishable from random bytes if you don't know the key.

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

#569
post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A lot of people use Claude as a friend/therapist/romantic partner People developing a para-social (pseudo-social?) relationship with a corporate robot have far bigger problems than the word-chooser in their robot "friend".

Very intelligent people need intelligent-others to bounce ideas off of, and the LLM can be that.

Yes, I use LLMs this way, they're not friends, not therapists, not persons, they're tools, like a word/language calculator.

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

#570
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…

Would really like to know how their watermarking technique works, and if they can use it to store arbitrary information in the text (I assume they can if only in a limited way). I assume if the text is long enough they could add all kinds of metadata that would then be undetectable as the model that generated the text is the "cryptographic" key that encodes the data. I wonder if you can have another model run over th…

I realize that short attention spans are pervasive now, but the link to the explanation is only eight paragraphs in https://declaude.org/watermarking/
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