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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

#741

Post by wpietri »

robomc wrote: post #152
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…

I assume they are just passing off AI prose as their own and don't want anyone to be able to tell. Which is surprising for someone who's been blogging for a thousand years. But I don't really see any other reason for this amount of heat and FUD.

It's a reasonable theory for sure.

From what I read, two big problems for long-running columnists are getting tire of the work and running out of things to say. I have no knowledge of Gruber, but I can certainly see why people who are expected regularly to have something to say would turn to "AI". It doesn't get tired and is always ready to spew infinite words.

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

#742

Post by throwthrowuknow »

KaiserPro wrote: post #474
Y-bar wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't remember any radio determining words or adjusting grammar of the person speaking through it. Neither can I recall there has ever been a moveable type press, laser printer, or inkjet which bastardised the words of authors. These were mediums _through_ which communication happened. Language models, large or small, are not any such medium.

> 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…

This is very poignant. The entities that controlled the content broadcast over radio and TV or what was published in books and newspapers had an enormous impact on both culture and language. Radio and print didn’t just transmit the voice of a single person, the message was shaped by whole teams of editors, bureaucrats, politicians, censors and the necessities and constraints of the technology. Any message that a person tried to transmit through these channels was transformed more than it would be if you ran it through an LLM or more likely not transmitted at all.

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

#743

Post by sReinwald »

inigyou wrote: post #732
pjc50 wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evidence is a massive problem here. As well as the extremely high threshold for US defamation; political candidates routinely tell the most absurd lies about each other.

In places like Germany it's a crime to say something that makes a politician look bad, even if it's true.

That is simply incorrect. In Germany, truth is a complete defense as far as libel and defamation cases are concerned.

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

#744

Post by throwawayffffas »

wpietri wrote: post #740
throwawayffffas wrote: post #734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I care about optimal word choice when generating LLM texts. Because my use case is almost exclusively reading the generated text not posting it. I use LLMs to summarize, translate and review other texts. When using LLMs in that way, as a research tool watermarking is a pointless and should not get in the way of "optimal" results.

Again, given the limits of LLMs (stochastic, rapidly changing, everything's a hallucination, widely known prose issues) I am skeptical that you really care that much about optimal prose. I could believe it's one of the things that you care about, but at a pretty low priority level. Taking you at your word, though, I'd be interested to see what you think of the watermarking technology in a blind A/B test.

It's very important on translations at least. Watermarking will result in poorer results.

Do they also do it with code? Do you think deliberately picking tokens that are not the highest probability in code is acceptable for the consumer?

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

#745

Post by hirvi74 »

apparent wrote: post #592
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…

And I'm sure students will use tools to have every other paragraph written in the style of a different AI, in an attempt to defeat this fingerprinting.

I saw that someone already created a Github repo for a Python script that strips the watermark out of Claude generated text. It was released, I think, within 24 hours of the announcement. I cannot attest to how well it works, but I found it humorous nevertheless.

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

#747

Post by DivingForGold »

There will be services online that copy/paste (or you provide) the text from ai, they OCR it to get rid of watermarking, then feed it back to you for a fee.

The premium upgrade will be "obfusicators" that further modify the text sporadically to make it look more like a human wrote it.

Students for one, will gladly pay.

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

#748

Post by Timwi »

inigyou wrote: post #109
moralestapia wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are diffusion-based models and transformer-based models (and many other "architectures"), so your comment does not make sense.

Are there any diffusion-based or otherwise non-transformer-based models in mainstream use?

Image GenAI is diffusion-based, and I would say the image GenAI in Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT are all “in mainstream use”.

I've heard of attempts to use diffusion models to generate text or code as well, but my impression is that it just didn't yield the level of results necessary to dethrone a frontier transformer model.

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

#750

Post by jeansilga »

cocoa19 wrote: post #605
ThePhysicist wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Removing the watermark usefulness depends on your use case. If you care to avoid detection, yes, it is useful. If you care about the best possible sequence of words, then the damage is already done once watermarked.

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