>I want any LLM I use to choose the very best, most precise words at every single decision point.

Does the author think he is currently getting T=0 output from Claude? Is he under the impression that T=0 produces the "best" writing?

This entire article just seems so detached from the basics of how LLMs work.

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dofm 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Does the author think he is currently getting T=0 output from Claude? Is he under the impression that T=0 produces the "best" writing?

No and no. I am not sure I agree with his point but I know he is not ill-informed on either of these points, because I mentioned them to him a couple of days ago.

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brookst 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It didn’t take, apparently.

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dofm 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It’s fully possible I didn’t explain it very well in the first place, but he is making a wider point.

The point I made (quite briefly) is that watermarking is only feasible because for good writing it is necessary to use T>0, or the writing will never explore a more creative choice, and that at T=0 you don’t even need a watermark to spot LLM-generated text.

The point he is making is consistent with this, isn’t it? Either you allow temperature to drive creativity, consistently in a way that can be influenced and analysed, or you adulterate that process for the purposes of meeting a corporate/legal directive, in a way that is proprietary and obscure. These are ethically distinct approaches, and since he disagrees with the EU objective he comes down on one side I guess.

Me, I don’t care about the hypothetical enough.

Not least because I think Claude writes depressingly badly and I doubt any steganographic change will enrage me less.

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wasabi991011 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

The point he is making is not consistent with understanding how temperature influences LLM text generation, no.

He repeatedly states that choosing "the best word" is the most important thing to him. I don't know how you reconcile that with creativity itself, let alone probabilistic sampling.

	▲	dofm an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I mean creativity there in the LLM sense (temperature driving more creative solutions), not the human sense, and in the context of its consistency, configurability and being amenable to analysis. The watermarking approach makes that non-reproducible, yes? Because Anthropic can and will change it as they see fit.

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beering 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No, you are jumping to conclusions about how watermarking works. This is some audiophile thinking that because your RNG is “pure”, you get text with an expansive soundstage or whatever. Intuitively this may be true or false depending on your personal prior but you’d need to show it mathematically. The overall token distribution shouldn’t change and the frequency at which you see the word “load-bearing” will remain the same.

	▲	dofm 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> This is some audiophile thinking that because your RNG is “pure”, you get text with an expansive soundstage or whatever. You are projecting that onto me, and I cannot tell you how comically poorly aimed it is.

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inigyou 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What does he think of all the other adulterations of LLMs that already happen?

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Gigachad 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think the author is just mad people will be able to detect and filter out their AI slop writing in the future.

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dofm 3 hours ago | parent [-]

This is not it, no. He is not using AI and it is not I think remotely in his nature to surrender that control. He is engaging with this on principle. Again I am not sure I agree with him, but then it’s a hypothetical because I am not going to get an LLM to write for me either.

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beering 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Well, it cant be that he is super worried on behalf of people who publish AI slop. That’s not a credible motivation. In fact, he complained a lot about the new ChatGPT app so I can’t believe your claim that he is not using AI.

Seems like he really likes to use LLMs and is worried that quality will be degraded. But he will never demonstrate such degradation scientifically, we don’t have anecdotes even.

	▲	dofm an hour ago \| parent [-]
		His complaint about the ChatGPT app is that it’s a shitty non-Mac-ish Mac app. Complaining about shitty non-Mac-ish Mac apps to people who hate shitty non-Mac-ish Mac apps is more or less how he became a full time writer.