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Comment by mchusma | Hacker News Reader

Many good comments here. It’s somewhat common for me to voice record say a blog post of product updates, more like a ramble. Then have Claude clean it up. Then argue back and forth about certain things until it’s good, then make a final pass sometimes to change a few key words. This is incredibly different than pure ai text. Presumably it will show as ai generated here, even though I would argue it is not really. So I can’t use Claude for this usecase anymore.

I think the solution is assume everything is ai generated unless told otherwise and rely on authorship/brand as a sign of quality.

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The watermark is contained in the choice of output tokens. If you exert so much editorial control that Claude has no meaningful freedom in choosing tokens, then it's going to fail to watermark the text, unless the text is _very_ long (in which case even a very low-bit-rate watermark will eventually accumulate enough bits to be positive.)

But it is not incredibley different than pure ai text tho, it is literally the same as pure ai text.

I understand you're saying since you "worked with it", it is not ai generated but if you still use the final output verbatim, the writing itself is LLM generated purely.

You want to share the output by it but also position it as not ai output. But that's fundamentally dishonest.

Furthermore, if you think your approach actually creates value and can be judged on its merit, why not disclose its ai written? If you think that will make people think your content is bad then you should see that as feedback and maybe not use AI since readers don't like it.

IDK. At my job it seems like it's expected you'll use it in that way.

In academia they've got their own concerns of 'purity,' (not least of which is justifying their continued existence which is in my opinion hard to do) and they are the ones who are going to want most strongly to punish anyone who uses AI.

And perhaps "journalists," who will want to trumpet the latest government's press release being [what they'll portray as] mostly AI-generated, as a headline-grabbing "gotcha." Ironically, that may even be a story that'll be written by a fully-autonomous journalist "agent" in a newsroom that's been pruned of all human journalists!

But in business it seems to me that we're all agreeing that it's a "good" use of AI to write in that way.

Simply write your own posts if you don't want people to think they are AI generated.

I've done this before at work, and I feel true ownership of the output after this workflow. Moreso than when someone from a marketing team publishes a blog with the CEO's name as the author.

You can do something like "here's my website. Read it, then try your best to write in my voice. Do your best to avoid common and uncommon tell-tale AI-isms"

If you're putting the work you say in, the result won't be obviously distinguishable. Obviously, from some of the things that get posted here, that last sentence is too much for most people to bother adding to their prompt.

Perhaps. But it seems like your beef is not with the presence of watermarking, it's with what people will use that watermarking for. You're not directly harmed by that blog post being labeled as AI generated. In a hypothetical (but unfortunately likely) world where everything has passed through an AI's digestive system, nobody would care.

In the meantime, it is true that this takes something away from you. But it's something you were only recently given. Now you're not given quite as much, but readers are given a little more (or rather, there's less being taken from us!)

> This is incredibly different than pure ai text.

Ok. But it's still incredibly different from pure human text. I guess the question is which provides more value? Providing the information "this text is AI watermarked" to readers? Or allowing creators to lie and claim that AI processed text was 100% human generated? I agree that people assuming that "has AI watermark" == "is AI slop" is incorrect and causes some amount of harm, but having the watermarks also pushes back on a large amount of harm already being done.

(Personally, I'm skeptical that these watermarks will ever hold up to adversarial attacks, and they haven't claimed that they will. So I think it's the usual "casual liars will be caught, determined liars will get an additional thin veneer of respectability".)

I would push back on the fact that nobody would care. It is clear that platforms are increasing creating AI-generated as a category and it will only get more precise over time. Platforms that have built trust/aura over what type of content they host will resort to this more as they get more flooded with ai generated low effort content. I recently wrote a blog on this actually: https://decodingvibes.com/blog/aura-and-the-backlash-against...

I'm going to push back on your pushback and say you're not disagreeing with me.

I was referring to a hypothetical future where everything has gone through AI to some degree, and for the purpose of the argument it has been modified enough to embed a watermark. Thus, the "detector" just always returns "true" in practice, and therefore nobody cares about what it says anymore.

I think what you call "aura" in your essay is already very much a thing. We use the adjective "artisanal", for example. Artisanal, bespoke, heirloom. hand-crafted, small batch, ... we have many ways of trying to convey "aura". (Heck, even things like "minority-owned" or "woman-owned" are attempts to imbue an aura.)

But more to the point of text, I'm also fascinated by the evolution of taste in this area. People's ability to detect AI slop improves, triggers revulsion to things they were previously fine with, and then sometimes they'll go back to being neutral once they start using AI more heavily themselves. Some AI writing is noticeably better quality than the human written version, yet it still smells of slop, and I at least am sometimes torn about which I prefer. Then there's the trend of AI writing getting better, substantially better, and sometimes at the same time worse in certain ways. Not to mention students, many of whom are now much more accustomed to AI writing than human writing -- it's their mental model of what an essay looks like, especially when all of their own essays uncoincidentally read like AI writing. And then there's all the nuance of the sometimes subtle differences between a wholly AI-generated piece of writing vs a heavily human-directed piece of AI writing vs an AI-edited piece of human writing vs a translated piece of human writing. It's fascinating and scary.

I too am curious about the final question in your essay: "will such categorization lead to the development of a potential human premium?"

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