What benefit is there to people believing that LLM text was actually human written?
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.
If you can't tell which one is better then how can you make any assumption about performance?
For all you know performance is the same.
So many people complaining about something they quite literally have zero evidence for.
literally never how it has worked
Ask a model the same question twice and you will get different results. So, how were you ever getting “the best result, always”?
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...
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.
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.
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..
So, you think it's good to disconnect words from their actual meanings (lie) to low-information people! I doubt this will do much to congress, but it certainly teaches us something about the sort of mind who would suggest it.