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Comment by shubhamjain | Hacker News Reader

What an absurd take on a very reasonable concern. As much as I hate “obviously AI” writing, I don’t understand why we have to handicap the tech and prevent it from improving. This manipulation of word choices virtually guarantees AI will always sound like a robot.

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Have you compared pre- and post-watermarked text to make that assertion? And I'm not sure how writing your own text if you care deeply about the word choice is handicapping the technology?

The entire watermarking scheme is based on replacing a random number generator with a seeded random number generator.

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.

I don't think there's been a single version of the major LLM providers that haven't handicapped the tech since the beginning by changing temperature/top-P/frequency penalty/etc. All of those stray from "highest probability" token selection. What's funny is it was done specifically to make it sound less like a robot/deterministic.

> This manipulation of word choices virtually guarantees AI will always sound like a robot.

You make it sound as if that were a bad thing.

Reasonable? A concern which is based on no real data?

With all things going on among AI bros and the AI industry as a whole, are you really that surprised there is a widespread aversion against the tech?

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