Comment by ButlerianJihad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ButlerianJihad | Hacker News Reader

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It is quite just, if you think about it. Human works are copyrighted and protected at the moment of creation. All rights reserved. Yet, LLM outputs are uncopyrightable. Therefore, if Claude or any AI has processed my copyrighted work, the end result is uncopyrightable and in the Public Domain. The public has a right to know: is this a human copyrighted work, an LLM PD work, or is the human falsely claiming authorship in order to retain copyright?

A point of confusion for me, however: is every watermark unique? Is every algorithm for watermarking going to vary amongst models and amongst model versions? Will each model publisher keep this watermarking as a trade secret, that they alone can detect? If so, this can't scale! How do you detect "JoeBob 4.3 LLM" output? By querying every single model's watermark-detector? And if they all work by re-running the model and using tokens anew? That is extraordinarily wasteful.

If a watermark is not self-evident, or universally detectable, then it is no good. Take, for example, US currency. The security measures are published and well known. Any count-out room in retail has a big poster indicating how you can detect authentic US bills. Nobody has to accept non-US currency in the US, and so the only authenticity you need to worry about is your US bills alone. LLM watermarking has none of this in common. Currently sounding like a shitshow, if you ask me.

As I understand it, the current watermarking methods rely on a secret key, making the detection schemes a black box to anyone not in possession of the key. This means organizations like Anthropic are free to make any claim about authorship they want, true or not, and no one can call them on it.

Part of the legislation requires them to make a public AI text detector (ala GPTZero I assume).

Wouldn’t having that be enough to eventually reverse engineer the key?

Not if they designed the algorithm right.

Probably not to get the key, but you could certainly use it adversarially to remove the watermark.

Removal may come down to changing every third token to a different one.

Yea, they are going to have to monitor how often similar writing pieces are being submitted, or limit the access to the checker somehow.

Europe trusts its institutions way too much. It may well be that only the police can access the checker.

Perhaps LLM outputs are uncopyrightable, but derivative works of copyrighted works are not automatically in the public domain.

That's an intriguing twist, isn't it? It could lead to a tug-of-war.

Working backwards: if it is possible to confirm 100% confidence that a chunk of text is LLM output, then it is "PD until proven otherwise". How can a human reliably assert human authorship of their source text? When all watermark tests fail? Is that proof of humanity now?

If a human proves human authorship, and LLM watermarking tests positive, then is that going to be considered a "derivative work" or not? What if there is an applicable license for the source work, such as "CC-BY-ND" that prohibits derivative works?

This has not been court-tested, and I expect that it will need testing at that level before we can have any assurances.

The watermark, if I'm understanding correctly, only proves that something has been touched at some point by a particular model, not that it was entirely generated by a particular model.

As for it being "uncopyrightable" if it were the output of an LLM, I think computer people are making a very aspie interpretation of a single decision. I think it's more that the LLM (and thereby its owners) cannot itself hold a copyright on its output, that output has to be touched by a person before it is copyrightable. A particular view from the top of a mountain can't be copyrighted, for example, but a photograph of that view can be.

I'm not sure it at all precludes a "robosigning"* sort of situation, where machines generate output, hired temps sign and claim that output, and immediately sign it over to the people who hired them (as a work-for-hire.) Copyright is stupid, artificial law, not logical.

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* https://www.mortgageauditsonline.com/what-are-robo-signers/

> The watermark, if I'm understanding correctly, only proves that something has been touched at some point by a particular model, not that it was entirely generated by a particular model.

For the watermark to be detectable, the text needs to be like 75% AI generated.

If you have an LLM “touch” one section of the article, it’s not gonna be detectable.

How do you assert it now? I post some text on the internet, you claim you have copyright, how do you prove that?

Some camera pointing at you while you work. Guessing the camera needs to be watermarked itself, which can be done by adding some watermark on the chip level (each camera will have different watermark), manufacturer can confirm the watermark.

Is that realistically how that is proven in court today?

Copyright law was updated in a very helpful way in the last twenty years sometime so that as soon as you post something to the internet you have copyright. If you need a citation don't hesitate to ask someone else.

So you can just say some text is copyright to you and it is?

Here is some text that is copyright to me. As you infringed my copyright, please pay my $5000 license fee for every user who has read it:

> Copyright law was updated in a very helpful way in the last twenty years sometime so that as soon as you post something to the internet you have copyright. If you need a citation don't hesitate to ask someone else.

Rather casuistic take, there.

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