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Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

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Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#481

Post by skeptic_ai »

solenoid0937 wrote: post #421
MichaelZuo wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to interact with the LW crowd… and they were mostly not outright swindlers or scoundrels. (from what I could sense) I think it’s fair to say most had decent respectability. Anthropic hired heavily from that pool so it’s astonishing how it turned out.

Everything they do is understandable if you think they are being honest when they say they're building superintelligence. In this case they want to prevent a nation that censors its citizenry, puts/disappears dissidents into concentration camps for decades, and makes its own human rights lawyers literally eat their own shit, before raping and/or murdering them, from reaching superintelligence. In this light, some cli…

And do a -10 in their reputation. Plus blow up on hn first item on home page. I’m sure they are not very happy about this. And the sentiment of the people is going more negative by the week.

I have a feeling they will eventually drop the facade of “we’re the nice and ethic people” and will work with palantir so they can survive the future: ipo and models bans.

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#482

Post by skeptic_ai »

jfreds wrote: post #332
civet_java wrote: post #238

There are some commentors in this thread downplaying the severity of a service provider being less than transparent about exactly what their shipped tooling does on customer's machines. That the provider's business needs necessitate the this behaviour doesn't justify their lack of honest disclosure. That honest disclosure would render the solution to their problem useless isn't my problem. If anything, that they thou…

So they’re watermarking requests according to your environment variables and maybe changing a string format if you’re in a certain time zone? Am I missing something here? Where’s the five alarm fire?

Based on that info: they will provide you a shit model and sabotage your project. And you pay full price.

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#483

Post by Kevcmk »

loufe wrote: post #203
VortexLain wrote: post #56

Codex CLI is FOSS, unlike Claude Code, so Codex is less likely to do things like that, and it's one more reason to avoid Claude Code and Claude in general. Hopefully, many eyes will be looking into Codex for malicious things like that.

Genuine question though, why would I care about this if I'm paying for a subscription and adhering to TOS. I'm very skeptical about their privacy policy, business practices, and so on, but am curious what the negative about this is. Seems like it would work to my favour as a customer pushing back any date of the cutting of subsidies. That said, these fraudulent proxies are helping Chinese labs keep up, which might be…

What a historically bad take

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#485

Post by eloisius »

anon373839 wrote: post #446
bayindirh wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my understanding, distilling the model with another model is not illegal per se. Also, the output of the LLM is public domain by law, too. So, why all this "effort" to protect the model? This is a free market, and moving fast and breaking things is the norm. If they are so adamant on protecting their IP, maybe they can start by respecting others' IP, so we can start talking about ethics, equality and playing fai…

> If they are so adamant on protecting their IP, What they are trying to protect doesn't qualify as intellectual property. Only 4 categories of IP exist: (1) copyrights; (2) patents; (3) trade secrets; (4) trademarks. The capabilities embedded in model outputs don't qualify. Machine-generated outputs are ineligible for copyright. They aren't covered by patents. They aren't trade secrets, because the model companies a…

The hypocrisy of the pro-AI mega corp arguments makes my head spin. For three years they’ve been using the example of a human reading books and then outputting creative works influenced by them as analogy for training AI on copyrighted works. Now suddenly we’re supposed to not draw the same parallel about a hypothetical person who learned from Claude and is now outputting creative work based on it.

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#486

Post by eloisius »

stale2002 wrote: post #459
danlitt wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to admit that "downloading every book ever written for free from a repository of books that is itself illegal to compile and to run, in order to write a text generation tool" being legal is at least unintuitive, to put it mildly.

No it's not unintuitive. Just like I can learn from a book and nobody can make that illegal, so can other people transformative do the same with computers. Fair use is fair use.

Just like these distillers can learn from Claude’s output. Fair use is fair use.

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#487

Post by chii »

Philpax wrote: post #396
bayindirh wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my understanding, distilling the model with another model is not illegal per se. Also, the output of the LLM is public domain by law, too. So, why all this "effort" to protect the model? This is a free market, and moving fast and breaking things is the norm. If they are so adamant on protecting their IP, maybe they can start by respecting others' IP, so we can start talking about ethics, equality and playing fai…

It's not illegal to distil the traces, but it is also not illegal for them to try to stop it.

Imagine an electricity generating company saying that they don't allow their electricity to be used to cold start a competitor's generator.

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#488

Post by ToValueFunfetti »

eloisius wrote: post #486
stale2002 wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not unintuitive. Just like I can learn from a book and nobody can make that illegal, so can other people transformative do the same with computers. Fair use is fair use.

Just like these distillers can learn from Claude’s output. Fair use is fair use.

I don't think Anthropic argues that distillation violates copyright. AFAIK, their position is that it violates their terms and conditions for interacting with their servers.

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#489

Post by podocarp »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #442
bayindirh wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the asymmetry. When small fish tries to protect itself, big fish hits small fish with "It's not illegal" pole. When small fish points out that what the big fish is crying about is "not illegal", big fish has the right to be above the law to prevent the problem themselves. Having values requires equality. They have lost the right to cry foul when they trained their model with "but it's fair use" card. Life work…

> I love the asymmetry. Much as I hate to defend companies climbing to success and pulling up the ladder afterwards, this asymmetry you note is kind of the whole point a company would want to grow big . Growing an organization has some super-linear costs and generally sucks for most individuals living through it - including the management - but it's still considered worth it, precisely because big entities can do thi…

I've actually heard it quite a few times from different people who want to climb the greasy pole to get heard or resources. Idk it just seems rather soulless and slightly psycho to me. It also seems like that kind of system is rather broken and unstable, if the only way you get impact is to climb up the ladder and whatever that entails.

Change this from humans to companies and I still think it feels slightly wrong.

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#490

Post by rnagulapalle »

civet_java wrote: post #238

There are some commentors in this thread downplaying the severity of a service provider being less than transparent about exactly what their shipped tooling does on customer's machines. That the provider's business needs necessitate the this behaviour doesn't justify their lack of honest disclosure. That honest disclosure would render the solution to their problem useless isn't my problem. If anything, that they thou…

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