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.
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.
You are projecting that onto me, and I cannot tell you how comically poorly aimed it is.
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.