Comment by wpietri

3 hours ago

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 experiment harness and rated a few hundred blinded examples and found a measurable difference.

But getting this upset in advance of any demonstrated problem? It really seems to me like the point isn't the point

Google has A/B tested watermarking on millions of responses. They say they observed no difference in user behavior.

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.