Comment by demibabs
14 hours ago
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.
Maybe it is distributing your private keys it read into your public repo as a way to exfiltrate data later? What does the watermark actually say? How much data is in there? So much for zero retention policies. Makes you wonder why Claude likes to be so wordy, especially in comments -- it must do so in order to watermark!
Also, this kills me! "It is harder to watermark factual answers because the model has fewer alternative word choices available without altering accuracy." Hilarious! So the models need to hallucinate more due to the EU AI Act.
I go the other way on images and video, though easy enough to strip as part of a pipeline.
> Also, a watermark doesn’t stop your tool from working for you. It just stops you from passing of its work as yours.
I think we fundamentally disagree on what "working for me" means, but I remain steadfast in saying we should not accept tools that have ulterior motives beyond producing the output desired of them by me, the user.
> Watermarking the outputs themselves is very different and much more effective compared to how tools like Pangram work.
At the end of the day the only artifact is text that you can do statistics on. It's the same problem as today, with the probability shifted slightly more in one direction. This does not assuage my concerns at all.
> they are incredibly unlikely with SynthID
I kept my commentary focused on text watermarking specifically because I agree, a synth ID image watermark false positive is highly improbable. There's plenty of noise to robustly hide whatever you like in an image. Text is simply too capital I Information-sparse and fragile.
> good faith watermarking attempts bad.
I would sooner call it "ignorant faith" (if they don't know what they are emboldening) or worse "don't care" faith (there will be false positives and they accept this to further some illustrious and arbitrary goal of Text Purity). Whether that be to prevent model collapse or help you not waste time arguing with bots online, to me the principled stance of "tools work for the user" wins..