alt Hacker NewsI 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?
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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.
> 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...
The only one who decides if something gets flagged is Anthropic. There is no way to verify it independently because you need the same secret key used to create the watermark. I don't know about you but I always have a hard time trusting corporations to tell the truth.
Every watermark scheme is like that on some level. If you make it public (not even open source or downloadable, API access is enough) your enemies will use it as a detection oracle and spam small changes to a document until it passes the detector every time. If you keep it private and only give trusted organizations access then there is no way to prove to the public that you're not getting paid to flag specific content as AI and discredit the author.
But the biggest problem here is the way it can hurt output quality. Most LLMs (probably including Fable) are autoregressive so a couple tokens worth of "mistakes" caused by watermarking can derail the whole reasoning chain. That means you have to try again and spend more credits or silently get a worse answer than what you would get without the scheme. It's not a real problem in diffusion based image models where quality loss stays local.