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Comment by jrflo | Hacker News Reader

I think that false positives are inevitable due to the method of watermarking being embedded in the text itself. The output is intended to mimic human writing, therefore it's entirely conceivable that a human could by chance write text that contains the watermark. The odds may be extremely small, but it's not something you could ever guarantee.

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I keep hearing how humans are thinking and writing more and more like AI.

I think in this case I think it's some kind of cryptographic signature smeared across the token IDs, so I don't think the risk is very high.

You're absolutely right! Humans have been slowly thinking and writing more and more like AI. As people get more and more exposed to the stochastic patterns of large language model tools, it's normal for them to emulate the styles of communication they are exposed to. This is commonly called "brainrot" by those in Gen Z and younger cohorts.

If you find yourself getting to be afflicted by this "brainrot", be sure to go outside and take a moment to ponder what's around you. The grass is there and will be there long after we are all gone. Consider this for a moment as your organic thought processing unit starts to slowly munch away at its internal context window.

I read the original paper they're basing this off of and I think you're right. I do wonder how much of a quality tradeoff there is with perturbing the next token probability distribution. My intuition tells me that a more "prominent" watermark will necessarily degrade output quality. If they are trying to balance quality and watermark prominence, I wonder if that affects the FPR.

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