Hacker News Reader

You can't make a blanket statement like this without knowing how the watermark is implemented.

Why not? I'm assuming that the watermark detector won't have plausible false positives on human-written text otherwise it won't have much merit to begin with.

If a detector flags something in your text and you've properly attributed that text to another author then what is there to worry about?

If you take it as given that the watermark detector won't have "plausible false positives" then, sure, your argument becomes trivial. I'm not taking that as given.

I'm not taking anything as given. If it suffers from false positives then you have nothing to worry about because the signal won't have any merit -- just like existing AI detectors today. If it doesn't suffer from false positives then you have nothing to worry about because your text won't be detected.

These things aren't binary. There is a large middle ground, which is where Pangram sits today. It's good enough to be useful, but I absolutely would not be willing to fail a student on the basis of a Pangram positive.

If you are implying that this Claude watermark may be good enough to enter the "evidence to fail a student" category then we have a major disagreement.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com