Comment by lemarchr
3 hours ago
Some here are arguing that mechanisms used by LLM providers already derail the goal of "the very best, most precise words at every single decision point", therefore the author is misguided.
The author has expressed a preference. Assume that there is a sequence of tokens, such that it is considered the absolute best by the author. This particular method of watermarking makes it less likely to generate that sequence, by definition.
I feel their argument would have been clearer and stronger if they had spent more time exploring the alternatives, and whether these alternatives would be just as effective. It is trivially easy to remove invisible tokens.
Like it or not, there is a public good to being able to identify AI generated content, and a small degredation in quality is tolerable in my opinion.
I don't think anybody has to worry about this issue though. Manual writing, coding, and proof reading continues to be an option. Where AI output is nothing to be ashamed of, the tools are available. For everyone else, there will be LLM providers that ignore EU law.
If the author has preferences on their "own writing" that conflict with Anthropic's, then they should actually write it themselves rather than paying Anthropic to do it. Private companies don't owe you anything, even less so when they're beholden to laws in foreign jurisdictions.
>Assume that there is a sequence of tokens, such that it is considered the absolute best by the author
You can't assume that because if that was the case he'd already know what sentence to write, because that's what that means.
The notion of a best sentence requires a final cause, an end to write to. By their very nature that's not how LLMs work, so you can't 'degrade' them on that front. They can't lose a property they didn't have.