Does the author think he is currently getting T=0 output from Claude? Is he under the impression that T=0 produces the "best" writing?
This entire article just seems so detached from the basics of how LLMs work.
No and no. I am not sure I agree with his point but I know he is not ill-informed on either of these points, because I mentioned them to him a couple of days ago.
The point I made (quite briefly) is that watermarking is only feasible because for good writing it is necessary to use T>0, or the writing will never explore a more creative choice, and that at T=0 you don’t even need a watermark to spot LLM-generated text.
The point he is making is consistent with this, isn’t it? Either you allow temperature to drive creativity, consistently in a way that can be influenced and analysed, or you adulterate that process for the purposes of meeting a corporate/legal directive, in a way that is proprietary and obscure. These are ethically distinct approaches, and since he disagrees with the EU objective he comes down on one side I guess.
Me, I don’t care about the hypothetical enough.
Not least because I think Claude writes depressingly badly and I doubt any steganographic change will enrage me less.
You are projecting that onto me, and I cannot tell you how comically poorly aimed it is.
He repeatedly states that choosing "the best word" is the most important thing to him. I don't know how you reconcile that with creativity itself, let alone probabilistic sampling.
That doesn't actually give you the 'best' text in any human sense of the word. Just like playing the 'best' move in Poker without sampling leads you to lose a lot of money.
This framing does not make sense to me. What do you mean by "influenced and analysed"? How have you or anyone been influencing or analyzing the randomness behind the sampling process to create better writing? What makes the unadulterated randomness "driving creativity" but a different random choice uncreative?
You're mischaracterising or misunderstanding my point, or I mangled it.
I mean it is possible to analyse, control, monitor, study the impact of changing temperature on the writing, yes?
The point about watermarking is that this relationship — change the temperature, see the effect — is now being adjusted by an unstated, secret process you explicitly can't control.
(I gather Anthropic have recently taken away this setting anyway; that was news to me.)
I think a good intuition here is that watermarking is sort of like picking a specific PRNG seed. It's not changing or interfering with the temperature - we're still sampling from the model's probability distribution. But we're making it so the analog of the PRNG seed is coupled to the previous context.
Describing it in terms of a word-by-word choice is simpler, but writing quality is dependent on the interplay between words.
"The weather today was cold and {grey,overcast}." If the next sentence is "I miss yesterday, when it was {bright,sunny}." then the choice between "grey" and "overcast" is no longer neutral. "grey" and "bright" pair together, as do "overcast" and "sunny". Or if you disagree with my aesthetic sensibilities, consider:
The weather today was cold and {grey,gray}. The {color,colour} of the sky matched my {humorless,humourless} mood.Seems like he really likes to use LLMs and is worried that quality will be degraded. But he will never demonstrate such degradation scientifically, we don’t have anecdotes even.
That's ... even worse? So we're all here in the comments trying to figure out what the author means, and what their overall point is, while clearly they don't even use the damn thing? Oof... What a waste of time for everyone involved.
It seems fully logical to me that someone who writes for a living (who, as it happens, developed the very markup language LLMs use for everything) should be invested in understanding the automatic plagiarism and word calculating machine from an intellectually honest position.
I personally am pretty severely big-two-AI-firms, increasingly anti-big-tech, but I am learning and researching uses of LLMs because for myself I really need to understand how to use them in an intellectually and (as far as is possible) ethically sound way. Learning because as a boring old freelance programmer I have to; foolish to pretend otherwise.
So I completely understand his position — that the AI industry is hot air and crooked and scammy and weird, and some of the people involved genuinely rather dark-sided, but the technology exists and if it hints at threatening your livelihood, you need to understand it.
From reading his work for the best part of twenty years or so (and emailing him intermittently over that time) it would seem to me that he's a lot less bearish on the tech industry than me, and a lot less fond of the EU than I am; he's more optimistic than I am. But he writes because he has to write. I should think that would make him highly invested in understanding what LLMs do.
I suggested he as a tech writer has reason to be invested in understanding how they work. It's not really a sustainable position to not understand, is it?
I don't think it's weird to ask that people commenting on x doing y with tech z at least try tech z, no?
Imagine this pamphlet: Basting a steak in a cast iron skillet with butter and herbs is a perversion of grilling a steak on charcoal. Signed, a life-time vegan who hasn't cooked a steak in their life.
Then imagine people jumping in the comments to discuss. Isn't it a waste of time?
On what specific basis do you assume he hasn't tried it? He's definitely blogged about the desktop apps, after all.
Or are you arguing that a writer doesn't have a meaningful or valid opinion on LLM-generated writing until they have tried to pass some off as their own?
This just seems weird to me. I mean, I have an opinion on this and I am personally never going to use an LLM to do published writing. On an intellectual level I can still see that there is nuance in it for others (for once I agree with him about an EU regulation).
But one of the issues with HN threads is that you can sometimes lose the sense of what you're replying to by clicking further down the thread, and I have committed worse misunderstandings than this, so absolutely no need to apologise (and I probably need to consider this when I am replying) :-)
His first take on this situation was cutely naive, thinking they were going to inject secret hidden unicode characters. But ultimately he has a massive hate on for the EU -- they were mean to Apple once -- and it comes out in any topic that overlaps.
He notes in various other posts that he uses AI/LLMs and chatbots quite extensively. (I don't recall what for exactly, but not for writing his pieces.)