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Posted by ropbear 21 hours ago

Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing(daringfireball.net)
669 points | 575 commentspage 7
jacobgold 19 hours ago|
Watermarking will be one more nail in the coffin of proprietary models if the world is so fortunate.

Reminds me of printer tracking dots.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots

inigyou 18 hours ago|
And yet we still use printers and 90% of our color documents have the tracking dots.
woadwarrior01 9 hours ago||
I think writing is the killer use case for local LLMs.

We've had so many advancements in LLM samplers for improved text generation (off the top of my head: min-P, adaptive-P, XTC, DRY, p-less, Top-H, Top-n-Sigma, and so many more) but hosted LLM APIs only provide three basic knobs: temperature, top-k and top-p which are old as the mountains in LLM years at this point.

One thing that doesn't help the local LLM case is that all the popular VC backed local LLM wrappers also only support the same three ancient knobs because I suppose they're more preoccupied with their next fundraise than with keeping up with the advances in tech.

tacker2000 19 hours ago||
Lots of faux outrage, rambling and hyperbole here from Gruber.

“Absurdly and insultingly”? Come on…

matheusmoreira 5 hours ago||
> It’s unacceptable for a tool to sacrifice an iota of clarity, coherence, meaning, quality, etc. for the purpose of embedding hidden clues within the text to suggest its provenance.

Yeah, that about sums it up!

mrtesthah 1 hour ago||
Claude is already a perversion of writing.
DarkmSparks 20 hours ago||
I dont see how there would be remotely enough entropy in most model outputs for this to be close to feasible with any kind of accuracy.

Either they false positve on pretty much everything ever written, or the chances of catching a true positive is so low as to be useless.

Basically Cinavia for text, and that often falls over and is easy to remove even when there is megabytes of data streaming over a long period of time rather than 2 or 3 bits per wall of text, let alone what most people use claude for, when there is a strict dictionary and other tight output constraints.

zzril 10 hours ago||
> Someone with the secret key can determine which list a word will be on at each token generation point (which is how the watermarking is detected); those without the secret key cannot.

How is this supposed to work in an actual lawsuit? Will Anthropic offer some sort of tool / (paid?) webservice to check for watermarks using that "secret key", and a judge is supposed to just believe whatever that tool's verdict is? And then it takes the EU another 20 years to understand what a silly idea this was?

ghrl 9 hours ago|
Yes, exactly, that is my understanding as well. Since the watermarking is based on a symmetric key by design (as to not be easily able to test and remove the watermarks), the providers will need to offer a watermark detection API.

I see even more problems with this. To check any text for those watermarks, it needs to be sent to dozens of AI companies to check, potentially paying them all for just determining whether it matches their watermark, and more concerningly sending all that mostly human-written, often high quality text like unpublished research or books, to AI companies that almost all proved to obtain training data through all kinds of dubious ways.

robomc 18 hours ago||
This is moronic. This is like being mad that the slot machine you think is lucky is occupied.
andrethegiant 5 hours ago||
Great question buried at the bottom:

> Also, what happens if another major global market makes it unlawful for AI to secretly watermark generated text?

elpakal 2 hours ago|
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?

Bluestein 9 hours ago|
Heck. The entire process itself of LLM text generation is a perversion of writing.-

Further heck: It can be said it ain't even writing.-

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