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Comment by SpicyLemonZest | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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)

>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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