For example, someone inventing a new technology might use AI to assist with code prototypes/doc prep etc. Where would that leave the rights of the owner/creator/inventor. These text watermarks provide fuel for legal battles.
Am I wrong?
I'm having a hard time thinking of any other use case... What other reason is there to fingerprint your code?
I assume if they arrest you for vibe coding something that violated computing laws (hacking) they can then scan your code, send it to anthropic, anthropic confirms that Claude was used on your account, on x device to build malware.
Remember they busted a hacker because of his Windows unique install ID.
Imagine a patent drafted by AI under human direction. Regardless of the current laws, this would provide evidence for, and leave the door open for future laws/claims...
Claims would literally be on the balance of probabilities, and there would be argument about exactly where the line is, given that some passages could be heavily edited while some might not be edited at all, and does that mean only parts of the work can be copyrighted?
Other countries allow copyright for AI gen work, so there's no issue there.
I don't have an answer either way, but I'm taking this occasion to remind you (and HN generally) that many people use LLMs for things other than code
In reality, there can be billions of red/green lists. It is trivial to test a piece of text against all of them to see if it was generated using any of the keys that made a particular red/green list. And, as you alluded to, there are enough combinations that each individual account could be assigned its own red/green list so not only would a person be able to tell if the output was AI generated, they would also be able to tell who generated it.
I believe many are missing the point as to the effectiveness of this watermark. It will be exceedingly difficult to get rid of it. Probably impossible. If normal human text uses, more or less, a 50-50 ratio of red and green tokens, and the AI generates your text with 80% red and 20% green, all the rewriting in the world is not going to get the result close enough to the human like 50-50 to avoid a statistical aberration that will be discernible.