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Comment by mgax | Hacker News Reader

This is such a waste of time. If someone wants to bypass this it will be rather simple. Just change the words. If someone wants to avoid fingerprinting they will. Can’t we just focus on building rather than spending brainpower on these ridiculous sidequests

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Focus on building what? A future in which only big companies get credit for their work?

Isn't that what this watermarking allows for? To allow LLM companies to detect that certain text was authored by their tools?

I think some EU regulations have merit and some don't, but going "can't we just focus on building instead of spending brainpower on following the law" is not going to win you much affection. There might be a connection between this pervasive attitude in tech and why now every proposed datacenter construction project is being met with ferocious public opposition.

This isn’t just a “techbro” attitude. Although they disagree on the specific problem laws in question, basically every political group (at least in the US) takes issue with the law as written. And most agree (72% as polled in 2023) that the law is written to favor the interests of the wealthy. The pushback against data centers isn’t in contrast to this—data centers provide the bulk of their benefits to wealthy investors, and many localities are permitting them against the will of local citizens.

You might also want to consider that many believe the current AI regulation push is a trojan horse for regulatory capture and subsequent domination of the industry by large, well-connected players who are hostile to privacy and individual freedom.

So when you see US people on a US site complaining about a law that affects US industry, especially scrappy startups, consider if maybe there’s more to it.

> And most agree (72% as polled in 2023) that the law is written to favor the interests of the wealthy.

But this situation is wealthy acting like victims, because laws are not favoring them enough. And then completely ignoring it again and again with "who cares we are superior, we dont have to".

There's lots of regulations that are easy to bypass. It's absolutely trivial to, say, pull 30 amps from a home circuit rated for only 15 amps. But most people will just trip the fuse because they don't know what they're doing, and the existence of the regulation makes it easy to prove ill intent for anyone who does know what they're doing but causes harm anyway.

Of course, the implication by comparison to the building code example, that text absent some homeopathic suggestion of provenance causes harm, is absurd at best.

Sent from my iPhone (harm prevention watermark)

The way I interpret your comment is that, in the future, it will be enough to prove that someone tried to remove an LLM watermark to put them in jail.

If someone causes financial loss by posting LLM text and is then found to have removed a watermark. Everything in civil law is implicitly inside a if(someone harmed && they sue you) {} block.

Imagine that somebody sold you text that they mislead you to think is not generated by AI and then trying to convince court that they didn't mislead you intentionally. If they've removed the watermark it stops this kind of defense.

That's already on the books... misrepresentation of the product sold... or does the EU doesn't have that?

Generally doing something intentionally or unintentionally might have different penalties.

Why not have our devices generate watermarks for everything? That way, we won’t have any kind of defence.

That's what is going on with images taken. iPhone and other cameras now have a per device cryptographic signature. https://c2pa.org/

Soon images taken without this signature will be unpresentable to the court.

These are corporate regulations, it's not really about putting individuals in jail. I do expect that there could be companies where trying to remove an LLM watermark is a fireable offense, especially in the EU where many kinds of decisions must be made by an accountable human being and may not be delegated to an AI system.

>There's lots of regulations that are easy to bypass.

Considering kids already use word substitution and other techniques to avoid plagiarism detectors, is creating a new kind of plagiarism detector weak to word substitution a valid path forward?

Actually, if anything it's just going to compound the false positive rate, making things worse for people who arent cheating.

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