Hacker News Reader

Comment by EagnaIonat | Hacker News Reader

> Push a bunch of EU Overregulation onto the rest of the world with text watermarking,

That's not part of the EU regulations. You only need to say that it is created by AI, and then only under certain conditions.

View on HN

That is simply not true. You need to go read that again, if you ever read it at all before correcting somebody about it

https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/50/

"Providers of AI systems, including general-purpose AI systems, generating synthetic audio, image, video or text content, shall ensure that the outputs of the AI system are marked in a machine-readable format and detectable as artificially generated or manipulated. Providers shall ensure their technical solutions are effective, interoperable, robust and reliable as far as this is technically feasible, taking into account the specificities and limitations of various types of content, the costs of implementation and the generally acknowledged state of the art, as may be reflected in relevant technical standards."

Eg... Watermarking...

You are over thinking it.

Just adding metadata is enough to meet these requirements. Or a paragraph that says the passage was created by AI.

EU AI Act is mainly about risk. Where there is high risk for the public, then safeguards are put in place. It has to be obvious that AI generated the content or outcomes are AI based and explainable.

Embedding a watermark directly into the passage of text doesn't meet this requirement. Although it will be handy for catching people who cheat at their homework.

Leaving aside the fact that this is already the new Ubiquitous Cookie Consent[0], how do you arrive at metadata on text output satisfying this requirement?

[0]: I was just in the EU and got a chuckle out of the "AI disclaimer" coming at the end of every second advertisement, soon to be every advertisement.

> a machine-readable format

Machines can read English now /s

If I get a response from the OpenAI API (or whatever), the fact that the text is embedded in a JSON object that is obviously an AI response, and even tells me which model was used and how many tokens it took, then I already have a machine-readable format clearly identifying the text as AI-generated. Whether the recipient chooses to keep that when they use the text is not my problem, right?

As the API provider, I would be very happy to consider myself compliant based on this. But I have a feeling it wouldn't fly in Brussels.

> Or a paragraph that says the passage was created by AI.

So if an AI-generated thing is cut in half, and only one half can be identified as being AI-generated while the other half can not, do we think that will be OK?

Legally that is fine. LLM provider requirements is judged at the output of the LLM. Not what happens after it.

It feels odd to call it overthinking when Anthropic has explicitly cited the EU AI Act as the reason they introduced watermarking in the first place.

Your "solution" is obviously not enough. It's not effective enough when somebody can easily remove that especially since watermarking of the text content itself has already been shown to be possible and is in production by all the major American model providers.

"Providers shall ensure their technical solutions are effective, interoperable, robust and reliable as far as this is technically feasible, taking into account the specificities and limitations of various types of content"

This is particularly relevant. There's no such thing as metadata for a raw text output so that part of your solution doesn't even make sense.

That leaves your other solution which is a paragraph that it was created by AI. How's that going to work for API calls? It doesn't even begin to make sense, hence watermarking.

> has explicitly cited the EU AI Act as the reason they introduced watermarking in the first place.

How they approach it, is on them. The EU AI Act just requires that whatever is AI Generated is marked as such under certain conditions.

> There's no such thing as metadata for a raw text output

Which is why you just have a paragraph saying that the content is AI Generated.

> How's that going to work for API calls?

Again, you are overthinking what the act is about.

It isn't that every API call requires to be flagged as AI.

It's the final output of the solution/application that has to be marked. Or the user is warned that what is created is AI generated.

It's to limit/prevent risks when AI generated content is used to make decisions that can negatively impact the public.

Your understanding of this is completely incorrect. You should browse the EU AI Act website more to see what's actually required and educate yourself.

Some further reading: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/code-pract...

Rather than refute, just hand waving. I guess we are done here.

Your level of reading comprehension is so incredibly low that it makes full sense why you can't see the difference between local models and the frontier models since you can't actually critically understand what you are reading anyways

The comment that you just replied to contained a link that directly refuted your claims but I think you probably failed to even read it or maybe even see the link?