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pkulakyesterday at 8:29 PM6 repliesview on HN

> 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.


Replies

markasoftwareyesterday at 10:31 PM

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

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k1mtoday at 1:46 AM

It reduces diversity, which they don't talk about much. Wrote about it here. https://blog.keyvan.net/p/ai-text-watermarking-and-quality

reasonablekloutyesterday at 9:37 PM

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?

geysersamtoday at 12:49 AM

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.

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NewsaHackOyesterday at 10:30 PM

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.

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arrrgyesterday at 9:52 PM

Why do you claim that?

There is no reason why there has to be a negative effect of text watermarking.

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