Comment by mgax
5 hours ago
This is such a waste of time. If someone wants to bypass this it will be rather simple. Just change the words. If someone wants to avoid fingerprinting they will. Can’t we just focus on building rather than spending brainpower on these ridiculous sidequests
Focus on building what? A future in which only big companies get credit for their work?
Isn't that what this watermarking allows for? To allow LLM companies to detect that certain text was authored by their tools?
There's lots of regulations that are easy to bypass. It's absolutely trivial to, say, pull 30 amps from a home circuit rated for only 15 amps. But most people will just trip the fuse because they don't know what they're doing, and the existence of the regulation makes it easy to prove ill intent for anyone who does know what they're doing but causes harm anyway.
The way I interpret your comment is that, in the future, it will be enough to prove that someone tried to remove an LLM watermark to put them in jail.
Imagine that somebody sold you text that they mislead you to think is not generated by AI and then trying to convince court that they didn't mislead you intentionally. If they've removed the watermark it stops this kind of defense.
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These are corporate regulations, it's not really about putting individuals in jail. I do expect that there could be companies where trying to remove an LLM watermark is a fireable offense, especially in the EU where many kinds of decisions must be made by an accountable human being and may not be delegated to an AI system.
If someone causes financial loss by posting LLM text and is then found to have removed a watermark. Everything in civil law is implicitly inside a if(someone harmed && they sue you) {} block.
Of course, the implication by comparison to the building code example, that text absent some homeopathic suggestion of provenance causes harm, is absurd at best.
Sent from my iPhone (harm prevention watermark)
I think some EU regulations have merit and some don't, but going "can't we just focus on building instead of spending brainpower on following the law" is not going to win you much affection. There might be a connection between this pervasive attitude in tech and why now every proposed datacenter construction project is being met with ferocious public opposition.
This isn’t just a “techbro” attitude. Although they disagree on the specific problem laws in question, basically every political group (at least in the US) takes issue with the law as written. And most agree (72% as polled in 2023) that the law is written to favor the interests of the wealthy. The pushback against data centers isn’t in contrast to this—data centers provide the bulk of their benefits to wealthy investors, and many localities are permitting them against the will of local citizens.
You might also want to consider that many believe the current AI regulation push is a trojan horse for regulatory capture and subsequent domination of the industry by large, well-connected players who are hostile to privacy and individual freedom.
So when you see US people on a US site complaining about a law that affects US industry, especially scrappy startups, consider if maybe there’s more to it.