Comment by akersten | Hacker News Reader

Comment by akersten | Hacker News Reader

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> generated text being watermarked is universally good.

If it worked perfectly, maybe you could make this argument in a vacuum.

It does not work perfectly. (It cannot. It is by definition a heuristic). That means there will be false positives. There is a chance those false positives ruin someone's career. See [0] for just how easy it is to push SotA "AI text detectors" in one direction or another.

Now, with watermarks, instead of everyone to some extent understanding that AI text detectors are wishy washy woo, they are now Anthropic certified to detect an official AI watermark.

With that kind of false confidence in hand, the people who trust the "computer says you plagiarized" machine are never going to believe you when you say "it can make mistakes," they're just going to fire you/take away your scholarship/cancel your grant/...

This is all beside the fact that we should demand our tools work for us and not for some shadowy master. "Universally good," absolutely not.

[0]: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-wouldnt-say-pangram-i...

Watermarking the outputs themselves is very different and much more effective compared to how tools like Pangram work.

Obviously false positives will inevitably happen (even though, they are incredibly unlikely with SynthID), but even still, that doesn’t somehow make good faith watermarking attempts bad.

Also, a watermark doesn’t stop your tool from working for you. It just stops you from passing of its work as yours.

> Also, a watermark doesn’t stop your tool from working for you. It just stops you from passing of its work as yours.

I think we fundamentally disagree on what "working for me" means, but I remain steadfast in saying we should not accept tools that have ulterior motives beyond producing the output desired of them by me, the user.

> Watermarking the outputs themselves is very different and much more effective compared to how tools like Pangram work.

At the end of the day the only artifact is text that you can do statistics on. It's the same problem as today, with the probability shifted slightly more in one direction. This does not assuage my concerns at all.

> they are incredibly unlikely with SynthID

I kept my commentary focused on text watermarking specifically because I agree, a synth ID image watermark false positive is highly improbable. There's plenty of noise to robustly hide whatever you like in an image. Text is simply too capital I Information-sparse and fragile.

> good faith watermarking attempts bad.

I would sooner call it "ignorant faith" (if they don't know what they are emboldening) or worse "don't care" faith (there will be false positives and they accept this to further some illustrious and arbitrary goal of Text Purity). Whether that be to prevent model collapse or help you not waste time arguing with bots online, to me the principled stance of "tools work for the user" wins..

Maybe it is distributing your private keys it read into your public repo as a way to exfiltrate data later? What does the watermark actually say? How much data is in there? So much for zero retention policies. Makes you wonder why Claude likes to be so wordy, especially in comments -- it must do so in order to watermark!

Also, this kills me! "It is harder to watermark factual answers because the model has fewer alternative word choices available without altering accuracy." Hilarious! So the models need to hallucinate more due to the EU AI Act.

I go the other way on images and video, though easy enough to strip as part of a pipeline.

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