Now for the human generated watermark. Timez to addd the speelling mistakes, decreaze the usegage of big words and proper gramicaly usuage. Wish I was joking.

The objection seems to be that Claude will always write worse prose than a human writer, even if the writing Claude generates is understandable.

Yeah, John. We're all OK with that.

Wait are we supposed to be mad because clankers are displacing human creative workers, or mad because clankers don't do their level best when producing creative works because they are forced to watermark text? Or is it that they use all the water (I know they don't but are we supposed to be mad about it still)?

I can't keep up with the current Chinese psycop. There should be some kind of status page like whywewantamericatofailataitoday.ai so we can keep up with it.

No, machines being used to replace human writing is a perversion of writing. Some might call it worse than cannibalism[0]. If you're only noticing now because Anthropic is changing things behind your back, well... I've got some bad news for you, but the entire cloud-hosted subset of the AI space, especially Anthropic, is premised on the fact that doing things behind your back to their models is socially preferable, or worse, should be outright mandated.

While I generally hate legal mandates to stab your customers in the back, in my opinion there is no harmless way to use AI and mandatory text watermarking is a good bare minimum. The EU probably made the right call. The entire AI space - open models included - is predicated upon worker exploitation, replacement, and deskilling; we should at least be able to know how much of our media diet has Anthropic's fingerprints on it.

A lot of hay is made over the pretraining process in which copious amounts of stolen data are trained on; but parallel to this is a huge data labeling and human feedback operation staffed almost entirely by people in third-world countries with robust English as a Second Language (ESL) programs. The thing is, AI models already watermark their text, they just happen to do so with the textual watermarks of the Indians and Nigerians that the AI companies hired to do RLHF because they were cheap. That's why certain AI models love the word "delve" so damned much. It's neocolonialism, designed specifically to do the kind of replacement the anti-immigrant idiots keep screaming their heads off about[1].

Furthermore, as we've seen with Hank Green, even non-cannibalism-adjacent AI usage is a recipe for worker deskilling and AI psychosis. The other half of the RLHF pipeline is to turn a pile of compressed text into a chatbot that feeds you a steady drip of unsourced information while praising you every time you spot one of its lies and never saying no[2]. This is a recipe for addicting your customers.

Also, this might just be because this is on daringfireball.net, but I can't help but think the author has an axe to grind against the EU because the EU mandated Apple sign third-party app stores. The fact that he's balking at Anthropic not going along with gating the watermarks to just the EU seems downstream of this - "why aren't you maximally attempting to resist the EU?"

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCPAIg7RUq8

[1] To be clear, upwards of none of the far-right have actually clued into the fact that AI is trained by underpaid immigrants, mainly because it doesn't fit the narratives the people running the far-right want to push. There are some AI robotics companies that are even very explicit that their robots are there primarily to launder foreign labor into rich companies and make permanent labor arbitrage.

[2] Continuing on from [1], the far-right actually really loves AI specifically because it rarely says no to even stupid ideas, even if it's also a manifestation of everything they claim to hate.

Imagine using a random word generator and getting upset that the random words it generates are not truly artisanal random words.

Whole watermark thing is just bullshit. What if I add a watermark text and another AI as well. How many watermarks and who is the real creator. It just doesn't make sense. I ll eat my shoes if this concept is still a thing in 6 months

"Anthropic's . . . Claude is a Perversion of Writing."

FITFY.

I have no sympathy for writers whining about what the AI is doing to 'their' writing. It's only your writing when you write it. There's any easy way to avoid this: don't fucking use it. Use you own brain.

[flagged]

[flagged]

[flagged]