| ▲ | levocardia 4 hours ago |
| Crazy how a smart person like this fails to understand the gumbel softmax technique. It does not affect writing quality at all, provably. The very fact that there is generally no "best next token" with 100% certainty is precisely why the trick works (you cannot watermark a response to "respond with the To be or not to be soliloquy from the first folio Hamlet", for precisely this reason). |
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| ▲ | wpietri 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| It seems to me like he started out mad and looked to justify it. I'm skeptical that anybody generating LLM text is really all that concerned about optimal word choice. Or even particularly good prose. But let's pretend that person exists. If that person tried, say, an open model and that same model with watermarking applied, I'd be eager to hear their thoughts on the prose quality. Especially if they built an experiment harness and rated a few hundred blinded examples and found a measurable difference. But getting this upset in advance of any demonstrated problem? It really seems to me like the point isn't the point |
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| ▲ | beering 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Google has A/B tested watermarking on millions of responses. They say they observed no difference in user behavior. | |
| ▲ | robomc 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I assume they are just passing off AI prose as their own and don't want anyone to be able to tell. Which is surprising for someone who's been blogging for a thousand years. But I don't really see any other reason for this amount of heat and FUD. |
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| ▲ | Art9681 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If this is true then the probability of the detection tools flagging completely human generated text as AI generated is non-trivial. Let's say I write a completely original piece and the detection tool says there is a 36% probability it was generated with Claude. What then? Now it's up to the person looking at the score to cast a subjective judgement. Maybe to me, anything over 25% is unacceptable. Maybe to someone else, it must cross over the 50% threshold. This is the problem. Cognitive surrender. |
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| ▲ | fwipsy 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > the probability of the detection tools flagging completely human generated text as AI generated is non-trivial How does that follow? AI-generated text is already not a perfect emulation of human writing. There's lots of room to affect it laterally without changing the level of quality. As I understand it, LLMs with temperature >0 can select from many possible outputs. All they're doing is limiting the possible outputs to ones that contain this pattern. I don't see any reason why the quality of that subset should be lower than average. The very best outputs will likely be eliminated, but so will the very worst. | |
| ▲ | pizzly 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Worse, what will academic institutions decide is the threshold for detecting AI generated work. If you have a false positive how do you prove it was a false positive or we all just trust the watermark detector over the student saying "I swear I did it all by my self" | |
| ▲ | wasabi991011 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That's an interesting problem to discuss, but unfortunately TFA spends no time discussing that. | |
| ▲ | pessimizer 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I don't think that's true. I think it's a binary 0% or near 100% probability of a watermark having been detected; the more changes to the text having been made after the text was output by the LLM and the less leeway the LLM had for probable word choices, the longer the passage necessary to see it. The "problem" is that seeing the watermark doesn't mean that the person claiming to be the author didn't make extensive changes to the output of the LLM, or that the LLM wasn't simply the final editor of something that the author had put a lot of work into. > Cognitive surrender. I don't know what this means. It's just drama. Don't let the LLM write for you and this is not a worry. I'm not worried about the poetry of LLM output being subtly adulterated. | | |
| ▲ | beering 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | No, watermark detection is not binary, you get a real number. You decide on a threshold when looking for the watermark. This is the problem - by random chance, some human text will be detected as watermarked. You can turn the detection threshold up until it guarantees <0.001 false positive rate at the expense of higher false negatives, but seems inevitable that someone gets wrongly flagged. |
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| ▲ | tapland 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Making blog posts about AI that make it apparent that the tech is going whoosh is a choice. |
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| ▲ | reader9274 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| "Smart"? Have you read his writings in the last decade? It's all nonsense, which is why I stopped reading circa 2018 |
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| ▲ | brookst 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think he’s still generally good on business, UX, and hardware design. That’s all subjective and taste I suppose, but his taste works for me. On deeper tech stuff, like this utterly nonsensical misunderstanding of watermarks… yeah, classic case of a guy who is smart, and has lost the ability to realize when they’re not knowledgeable in a domain. |
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| ▲ | docjay 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | selectively 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | RegardDetector 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | conartist6 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I couldn't be happier that people are mad about it. To quote Calvin, "nothing helps a bad mood like spreading it around" |
