Comment by flaghacker
11 hours ago
Text watermarking has no effect on output quality, it just works by changing the explicit source of randomness that is in practice always present in LLM output sampling. See for example https://www.seangoedecke.com/ai-text-watermarking-is-not-a-b....
> Text watermarking has no effect on output quality
It has an effect, and it's negative. It's hoped that the effect is negligible, and it probably is, but the whole point is that it has an effect.
Its essentially swapping out the psuedo random number generated with a differently seeded one iirc.
It has an effect on the output, but not the output quality
umm so like wait,
if I ask it to paint with a shade of red, but it paints with a slightly different shade of red, that is a fucking effect on quality
If you type like Joey using a thesaurus for the first time, it has an effect on quality
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It reduces diversity, which they don't talk about much. Wrote about it here. https://blog.keyvan.net/p/ai-text-watermarking-and-quality
It seems fine to me. The model is still solving my problems and writing code that works as well as any other.
Google has been watermarking text with SynthID for a while now and nobody complained about it. Why all the fuss about Claude?
It feels like the real reason behind most complaints is that people want to use AI for writing and not have others find out?
It has an effect, 50% of the time it's positive, increasing the quality of the answer, and 50% of the time it's negative.
These models are already running with a temperature that is >0. This just replaces a random number with a slightly less random number.
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I am pretty sure they did A/B testing to show it didn't. I could gave sworn they even released a quiz were the user has to try and guess which answer is watermarked or not and it was impossible to tell.
That's not the metric, though.
You either output the best version, or you output something else.
You can't do both.
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Why do you claim that?
There is no reason why there has to be a negative effect of text watermarking.
It literally re-weights the output tokens from what the LLM would otherwise have chosen. It _has_ to. It can't be positive, because then that's not watermarking, it's a better LLM.
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This is hilarious this keeps being repeated by the true believers ad nauseam.
Also, don't apply EU law to the world. It's a knee jerk reactionary regulation by a bunch of aging ding dongs that can't print their emails.
You're on Hacker News - I suggest you have technical curiosity and actually understand this very unusual and innovative algorithm, before you claim things about it that aren't true.