> "The exact words we choose when writing matter."
Then write your own damn text if you care about the exact wording so much
Then write your own damn text if you care about the exact wording so much
I’m willing to venture that Gruber is on the list of folks that get to hold the opinion choice of words matters.
People developing a para-social (pseudo-social?) relationship with a corporate robot have far bigger problems than the word-chooser in their robot "friend".
I also do it with a LLM every now and then and, while it’s feedback is more useful than a toy’s, it does not need to be intelligent either.
Right. If the exact words matter, using a non-deterministic LLM is a terrible idea in the first place. I hope these people never try putting the same prompt in different sessions.
Also, now I am curious. How would these people interact with other humans? Is there anyone on earth who would provide the exact same reply, down to every single word, if we asked them the same question more than once?
http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2026/04/open-ai-strikes-ba...
If you want precision and clarity of your writing, then you need to hand write it. Just like when you are optimising, its common to drop to a lower level language because the compiler doesn't express what you want. Sure its hard, but you know, thats kinda the point.
Even if you don't want that, the LLM is an average of the style it was trained to give out. Which is a homogenisation of the language to create a vague padding medium between a few generalised facts. (because a. it makes it less jarring when stuff is wrong, because its smeared over a higher amount of text and b. it looks more 'professional' because American business English is all guff and no meat)
Also yes, two isolated phrases may have subtly different meaning, frankly, the nuance is missed on most people. If you look at the interactions on here, at least 25% of the arguments are caused by people angrily reacting to the things _they_ thought the other person was saying, rather than what the actual person was saying.
So no its not a perversion, the LLM is, if you're gonna be picky about things.
exactly. in the same way that printed books affected word choice, so did the radio.
These were mediums _through_ which communication happened. Language models, large or small, are not any such medium.
Ah my friend, you are about to fall down a rabbit hole into standardisation of spelling, and the sometimes deadly debates about how to translate latin into the vernacular.
English, as she is written, is a great example.
for the spoken word, BBC/received pronunciation is another. I speak the way I do _because_ of BBC radio. The reason I have the accent I do is because I changed it to fit what the BBC put out, rather than what my local (impenetrable) dialect was.
You have to remember that your language is shaped by those around you when you are young. So if you are in an insular community, it will be reflected in your language. If I was a journalist, or hell, just me, I wouldn't be letting an LLM speak for me. So the bastardisation of my voice is down to me, not the machine.
but again, your argument is against LLMs and globalisation of culture, not finger printing.
> again, your argument is against LLMs and globalisation of culture, not finger printing.
ABSOLUTELY NOT. Do not ever put words in my mouth. My argument is that radio is a medium through which humans communicate. An LLM is not.
In the same way that handwriting conveys more information about the writer than type, typing ones own thoughts conveys more information about the writer than prompting an LLM.
The analogy here is hiring a speech writer to do your speeches, or dictating to a skilled typist.
I understand the vociferousness in push back
Technology mediates (human) agency.
[2] > My argument is that radio is a medium through which humans communicate. An LLM is not.
KaiserPro's argument is that radio (a one-way medium) mediates how humans communicate (phonetically), thus influencing how people speak.
Now that does not explain how the printing press and radio have influenced word choice (both of which I would like to see examples of!)
[3] > I can't remember any radio determining words or adjusting grammar of the person speaking through it.
Now media themselves did not really have something that looked like the kind of pseudo-agency that LLMs seemingly have. There may be some kind of qualitative leap.
(For the record, I read DF quite often as a Mac-minded techy weirdo, I just happen to disagree on this particular issue)
You make it sound as if that were a bad thing.
This cannot change the "voice" of the LLM. It was already letting a random number generator choose which adjectives to use. Now that random number generator encodes a tiny signal.
But fundamentally the way it writes has not changed.
It's not making it choose different words. It's a minor change to how it chooses between multiple nearly identical words, where in the current case it literally flips a coin.
> Marks will apply to output from supported Claude models across Claude Platform (API), Claude, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, and Claude Tag, and wherever Claude is offered.
I've never asked an LLM to generate writing I wish to post as my own. I don't understand why we think it is a good idea to fudge all output just so people can't cheat on their homework or generate slop. It won't have any impact on those things because there will always be models that don't do this. All it will do is increase the rate of false negatives.
It is deeply misguided regulation and Anthropic should have just said no on grounds of common sense.
The problem is, that LLMs worked very well for me to improve my writing. Especially as I'm not a native speaker, it was a great way to improve the legibility of my work.
I want a tool that helps me improve my writing. A tool I can learn from. Not a tool that switches out "bananas" to "airplanes."
I'm was using Claude Opus and now Fabel extensively for editing my texts and I find the recent updates abysmal. Not sure if it's due to the Text Watermark.
Before Claude was great in sharpening the meaning in my writing, it's now close to unusable.
The only difference here is that Anthropic is actively trying to make the watermark undetectable.
I was frustrated at first not knowing what they are doing.
After I read this post, (seeing they introduced it in August) I think it has to do with the watermarking.
Try it on a paragraph … the connections between sentences feel clunky now.
I will play with it more and see if that’s really the case (the watermarking making the text edits worse).
The power of confirmation bias…
> Try it on a paragraph … the connections between sentences feel clunky now.
We might have a definitive explanation at some point, but there are about a dozen possible reasons for something like this. For starters, is this something really significant and not something you notice because you are looking for it (again, confirmation bias)? A bit like some people still lose their minds when they see a dash, even though statistical analysis showed that they are not a significant marker of AI-generated text?
This is not about em dashes …
This comparison is frankly absurd.
When writing in English though, I use it more like a dictionary. If you want to write past a certain level, an LLM works better as a metaphor and idiom search engine.
I also like to ask it to generate 20 ways to say the same thing. It’s a great way to simplify or smoothen sentences without losing your voice.
I know that most people don't care, but my online presence is a search query for interesting people, so I care about what I put into it.
I don't expect the LLM to read my mind. The unit of work is too small for intent to matter, and I'll just steer the next recommendations in a direction as needed.
Most of the suggestions are crap, but they can contain the seeds of a good sentence.
Nitpicking here in a way that I would usually avoid, but it is relevant to the conversation being had and it seems like you might appreciate the information... "Readability" would be the more correct word to use here instead of "legibility".
Legibility is close enough for me to know what you mean based on the context, but it really applies to the visual presentation and how easy something is to read at a symbolic level (whether someone's handwriting or font choice is good or bad impacts legibility, whether someone uses good grammar or not impacts readability).
Watermarking per model is just the start. The method is cheap enough to distinguish individual users.
Then use pen and paper. It is the same, you say, right?
If they are adding so little value as to be as transparent as a pen and paper then why use one at all? Transcription doesn't need an LLM so that's not what you're taking about I assume.
That's their whole damn value prop: outsourcing thinking and producing without understanding.
I don't need to read emails in detail to respond any more.