Claude users are mad that Anthropic's new watermarks will catch them using it
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Well, the solution is quite easy: start thinking on your own again and write the lines yourself.
I welcome this watermarking. Finally it's an easy detectable signal that someone just generated some request/answer to waste my time by forcing me thinking for the other person too. Now that time is over.
(It never was hard to spot this type of texts but now there is evidence)
The data volume that is generated daily is staggering so every petabyte counts :)
We are very, very far from that! So far we have a single ai vendor introducing a statistical bias to their generation that can make it simpler to identify genAI in some (longer) texts. We don’t know yet how effective that will be in practice, and if other models will follow suit
Bingo. It makes people seem better than they are. They are building nothing. They are just ordering something. It's not impressive. I'm glad we can now easily tell the difference.
That's so cool and insightful.
[1]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08025-4 [2]https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8912793-provenance-signa...
Somehow it is acceptable for us to have photo, video or audio watermarked but not text or worse code.
> One need look no further than Reddit to find evidence of brewing discontent, though other posters on the site are not in agreement.
It’s a post about some Reddit comments, a nothing-burger.
It's turned on right now. Can you tell a difference? I can't.
How many ways could I write this paragraph and still convey the same idea? Way more than we're aware of. Hundreds? Thousands? Maybe a lot more? The number of semantically similar variants increases exponentially with each word.
I suspect anthropic could turn their fingerprinting up or down if they want. If it were turned way up, claude would use weird phrasing but it would take very little text to tell if something were AI generated. If they turned it down, it would seem imperceptible to humans, but you would need a large sample to determine (with high accuracy) that a passage was AI generated. There's probably a very large middle ground where humans can't tell, and where it doesn't take a large text sample to know (with high probability) that some text was AI generated.
It is quite counterintuitive, but you can hide texts the same size as the original text in imperceptible statistics of a text.
Compared to that feat, hiding a watermark is very easy.
"The restaurant "
Our next set of predictions might be:
[was, had, offers]
So we append the rank/index of the next token (0, 1, or 2) onto the secret. Given a long enough response, that secret becomes unique enough to use as a watermark. This obviously relies on having full deterministic access to the LLM itself, i.e. I don't believe it will be possible for users to derive the fingerprint from text that they've generated, only Anthropic will be able to.
The immediate objection is that this runs the risk of degrading the quality of the response. I think that's totally valid and I'll be curious how Anthropic handles it.
That's my very rough understanding! If someone with more knowledge wants to expand, feel free.
So the watermark words will be biased towards filler and fluff where invisible substitutions are easier, and the content is less (cough...) load-bearing.
The likely outcome is the development of AI watermark strippers which filter out all the twitches and tells that make default AI writing so annoying.
Google seem to have given up on SynthID for text for now, so this is likely a harder problem than it looks. My guess is Anthropic announced this to meet regulatory requirements. But they don't have a robust detector, and I seriously doubt they have a robust system that can survive trivial rewriting by a different model.
This is how I’m feeling right now.
A “watermark” is as an author’s mark. I struggle to understand how a myriad of different texts will produce the same watermark output. How big does a text have to be to generate this sign? What is the false positive rate (where my own authentic prose—gasp—is falsely accused of being AI). How do you “prove” it’s true? Will Anthropic offer some kind of service?
I find ChatGPT to be overly loquacious, and my preference for Claude is the brevity of output. Does this mean I will now have to suffer Claude’s gibbering, too?
> We'll support users and other third parties to detect Claude’s marks
This is the part that I fear most. What happens with false positives? Will I need to change arbitrary parts of my text if they are flagged as AI generated? Will I be forced to add mistakes?
And then, since LLMs are trained on existing, human-written, quality content, it may be that well-written text gets accidentally flagged more often?
And, if all the providers do this, and they use different watermarks, will I be forced to change things at random until I get a negative from all of those?
I very much think this will yield the wrong signal. There were already some academic plagiarism checkers around that would return false positives, and were blindly trusted by teachers and professors. I suppose AI checkers are all around now, and there will be more of those.
Proofreading is one of the best uses of LLMs that I can think about - I still write my text, then an LLM fixes some of my "errors" since I'm not a native speaker. It usually improves clarity. But now I risk my text to be classified as AI written with potentially bad outcomes.
I don't know whether I should blame the EU, though :-)
> during the months of autumn [...] Work is left to feebler hands. ... In those months the great oracle becomes —what at other times it is not—simply silly. In spring and early summer, the Times is often violent, unfair, fallacious, inconsistent, intentionally unmeaning, even positively blundering, but it is very seldom merely silly. ... In the dead of autumn, when the second and third rate hands are on, we sink from nonsense written with a purpose to nonsense written because the writer must write either nonsense or nothing.
Sounds like "The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art" where this came from was a wonderful little venture. Is there anything like it today?
Feels like "we sink from nonsense written with a purpose to nonsense written because the writer must write either nonsense or nothing" accurately describes HN sometimes :D
For example, what if I say, "Repeat this text verbatim: %long_human_written_text%"? Would the output be recognized as AI-generated or human-generated?
"And it doesn't stop there. There's the power question."
So not only is the Reddit user in question writing impassioned angry screeds about being caught using AI in their work, but they are presumably asking for Claude's help in writing said prose. I wonder what that prompt looked like?
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/1vlzjc8/about_t...
The whole text was a smorgasbord of the worst, most boring AI clichés possible. It was hard to finish for me, even though it is not that long, just because it was so badly written.
The only reason why I think it was partly written by a person who is just way too used to AI (as opposed to a simple prompt) is that the gaps in its logic feel more human than artificial.
first, they can skip them for training and
second, the AI output can be licensed to reduce, or at least detect, that if output is used as training data for other (more open) models.
It’s very simple, just change every third word for something different to what you originally wrote.
It’s very straightforward, just change each and every third word for something different instead of what you actually wrote.
And so on ad infinitum.
In my case the consequences are mounting. I've already essentially abandoned two communities over it. I'm sitting on human reviewed and tested mesa patches I can't bring myself to submit to upstream because of the AI stigma. I was using AI to revive some of my GCC work as well but abandoned it after their policy announcement. There seems to be no end in sight.
As an aside, I’ve never seen any pro ai people treat anyone not using ai like this.
If you're looking for signals, it's because you want to do something based on the result. Maybe people should work on getting rid of that impulse instead.
It depends on what the nature of the work is. If it's a work where technical soundness is the most important thing, then I agree. The criteria should be whether or not the work is sound.
But not everything is like that. Take fine art, for instance, where being human-made is a core part of its value.
I absolutely draw the line at thoughtlessly dismissing AI art as "slop" though.
Fair enough. I don't call it "slop" unless it is, and slop can certainly be made without involving computers. But genAI has without question made slop very easy to generate and so we're seeing quite a lot more of it these days.
I'm just saying why genAI art, sloppy or not, is of no interest to me and why I get angry when I've been deceived about it. Watermarking, if it were possible to reliably do (which I think it isn't), would solve that particular issue by making deception impossible. Without a reliable signal, a lot of stuff made after a certain date will inevitably and necessarily be suspect. Not saying that's right or wrong, just that it is. Maybe think of it as the audience being self-protective.
A reliable signal might even make acceptance of machine-generated art easier, by eliminating or reducing the chances that people will feel tricked.
I think I might have purchased some of those.
> Or the amount of shitty decomps appearing daily developed with Claude?
I'm developing one of those "shitty" decomps.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49267102
I'm still annotating the game myself though. Because I care about it and actually want to learn how it works.
> People are looking for signals because AI usage is a strong signal of poor quality trash.
Yes, I understand you want to dismiss works based purely on provenance without actually evaluating it on its merits.
Pre-judgement, as I said. Prejudice.
No, I will not help you do it.
> the only way you will overcome it is by proving you have something of actual worth
Ah yes, please continue. Do tell me about the worth of my own projects. GitHub and website links are on my profile.
I have gone over almost 20,000 games on Steam because I focus on indie game curation. If you have actually paid attention around you to the kinds of things people are throwing out there then you would understand. I have seen games that literally do not function with a bunch of generated assets [1], games whose sole providence is combining generated hollow art with a generated hollow story [2]. You are dealing with thousands of people who are doing exactly the same thing as you, with the same quality and the same reasoning. Your work can and will get filtered out along with the rest of them because you are using the same signal in the same way.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2832640/DEAD_GET_REKT/
[2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/3694060/Manos_The_Hands_O...
> You are dealing with thousands of people who are doing exactly the same thing as you, with the same quality and the same reasoning.
So you've just concluded I'm one of those people you keep reviewing on Steam. Very nice.
Did you actually look at my projects?
Legitimately we should have had this day one for a whole host of reasons (not the least of which is the issue of inadvertently using output from generative AI as training data for Generative AI).
But bigger than that is that while there are folks that want to be able to have a machine do their textual output for them with as little energy on their part as possible, the rest of us have to deal with the impact of that call on their part.
The purpose of communicating with other humans is not utilitarian, psychologically it is the pathway to connection and forms a large basis of how we are able to get along without eradicating ourselves as a species. Using generative AI to replace that humanity seems unthinkable to me, and having markers that help us differentiate serves as a way to keep others from gaslighting us, which undermines trust and communication.
I realize as a stereotype technical folks see communication as a means to a utilitarian end, but it's so much more important than that, so much so that even this small action of watermarking generative AI output can keep untold disasters from occurring because humans didn't know other humans were using it.
Claude outputs are already very easily distinguishable. The watermark is already pretty much there, even if it's not explicitly put in the outputs.
If you thought you could have AI "reorganize a paragraph" and not have anyone know, you're probably wrong. You can't because Claude can't fucking write even a paragraph without ruining it half the time. But apparently, a lot of people are either literally blind to writing style, or just don't care, because even most "Show HN" posts these days are extremely clearly AI slop with little care, marked and sometimes not marked. If you are fortunate enough to be blind to this (trust me it's not particularly fun, the style is truly grating) next time you're on a cool new project, just search/grep for "load bearing" and have a good laugh. or cry.
Of course, not everyone is necessarily trying to be misleading, but:
- I find this writing style to be truly miserable. It's like equivalently annoying to if the entire world started talking and typing in a slick quick-witted cynical way like we were all living in a Marvel movie script or something. Not exactly like that, but it's an analogy. I now realize some people may not notice if they got swapped into such a world and their parents and friends all just started talking like this out of nowhere.
- I find it disappointing when people don't seem to think they could do better, and would prefer to have an LLM speak in their own voice rather than them. It almost makes me wonder if people are even still alive behind the keyboard. Am I utterly insane or is it weird that people are deciding to have something else speak in their voice? For anything short of a speech or PR it just feels weirdly inappropriate. Even if your English isn't great, I probably prefer your English over Claude's. At worst... I'd probably prefer its direct translation attempt over its own attempt to write something.
I've been having a great time with LLMs but seeing the way people use them has introduced me to the fact that my taste is a lot higher above average than I realized. I'm not really thrilled about that realization, because all it really means is the bar is a lot lower than I thought it was, not that I'm going to win an award for having good taste. (It's not that good anyways. It's just that the depths you can go are apparently deeper than I thought.)
Whenever people respond with "well how do I know you're not just dumping out AI outputs" I just sigh. I've definitely seen evidence that people will accuse things of being AI output when they're not, yet I am completely unworried about either false negatives or false positives. If you really can't tell the difference between "the load-bearing smoking gun" and natural human prose, its embarassing for you, not me.
LLMs in this way deepen my already existing dispair, because they're yet again increasing the disconnect between me and the rest of the world.
I hope that if I ever ask for a letter of recommendation again that people will honestly tell me if they can't outperform an LLM when writing it.
(And before someone complains, I use Claude. But as an assistant occasionally. Not as everything. )
There should at least be some cut off where it applies and where it doesn't.