Comment by tyrabound
12 hours ago
You’re probably better off organizing a campaign to pressure Congress to prohibit American corporations imposing foreign laws on Americans, which is what this text watermarking is, regardless of how you feel about it. I think it’s a precedent we really don’t want to go down if you believe in democracy and self-determination.
It also clearly establishes or the very least moves in the direction that you don’t actually own or control the output of AI in any manner whatsoever, you’re just paying for it since Anthropic in this case can simply essentially brand/tag all your output that is based on not directly your own words, but a higher level process or methods that you use, including your instructions and how you structure your information and what your overall objective and goal is.
Anthropic is branding it on the behest of the EU lew, which already is an entity that is diametrically opposed to democracy and self-determination based on its structure even if you ignore the fact that it violates the most fundamental concepts of self-determination in its direct contradiction of the UN Charter and implicitly the Universal Declaration of Human rights.
What people done seem to be catching onto is that the EU is becoming the world dictatorship because the USA has simply had too many onerous people and that stupid constitution and its amendments that keep roadblocks world domination for the ruling class vampire.
I do not understand why people remain so up in arms. AI generated text being watermarked is universally good.
What benefit is there to people believing that LLM text was actually human written?
Because the incentive has been changed from the true best output always, to a mix of "close to the best but not always" output.
For the (majority) of us using Claude models for computing as a tool, obviously we're not going to be thrilled that our new tool will perform worse going forward.
Put the watermarked version head to head with the non-watermarked version.
If you can't tell which one is better then how can you make any assumption about performance?
For all you know performance is the same.
So many people complaining about something they quite literally have zero evidence for.
> true best output always
literally never how it has worked
Do you understand that LLMs are probabilistic?
Ask a model the same question twice and you will get different results. So, how were you ever getting “the best result, always”?
> generated text being watermarked is universally good.
If it worked perfectly, maybe you could make this argument in a vacuum.
It does not work perfectly. (It cannot. It is by definition a heuristic). That means there will be false positives. There is a chance those false positives ruin someone's career. See [0] for just how easy it is to push SotA "AI text detectors" in one direction or another.
Now, with watermarks, instead of everyone to some extent understanding that AI text detectors are wishy washy woo, they are now Anthropic certified to detect an official AI watermark.
With that kind of false confidence in hand, the people who trust the "computer says you plagiarized" machine are never going to believe you when you say "it can make mistakes," they're just going to fire you/take away your scholarship/cancel your grant/...
This is all beside the fact that we should demand our tools work for us and not for some shadowy master. "Universally good," absolutely not.
[0]: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-wouldnt-say-pangram-i...
Watermarking the outputs themselves is very different and much more effective compared to how tools like Pangram work.
Obviously false positives will inevitably happen (even though, they are incredibly unlikely with SynthID), but even still, that doesn’t somehow make good faith watermarking attempts bad.
Also, a watermark doesn’t stop your tool from working for you. It just stops you from passing of its work as yours.
2 replies →
I think Congresspeople hearing that EU AI Act is forcing secret codes into the infrastructure of American technology across all industries is sufficient.
> I think Congresspeople hearing that EU AI Act is forcing secret codes into the infrastructure of American technology across all industries is sufficient.
So, you think it's good to disconnect words from their actual meanings (lie) to low-information people! I doubt this will do much to congress, but it certainly teaches us something about the sort of mind who would suggest it.
It is simply a change in words invisible to anyone who does not have the detection API.