Its essentially swapping out the psuedo random number generated with a differently seeded one iirc.

It has an effect on the output, but not the output quality

umm so like wait,

if I ask it to paint with a shade of red, but it paints with a slightly different shade of red, that is a fucking effect on quality

If you type like Joey using a thesaurus for the first time, it has an effect on quality

	▲	markasoftware 38 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You do not get it. The llm never deterministically picks a shade of red. It's a probability distribution over shades of colors, with certain shades of red being more likely than others. Without fingerprinting, it randomly samples from the distribution using a certain pseudorandom RNG. With fingerprinting, it also selects from the distribution using a pseudorandom RNG. My understanding is that the fingerprinted prng is still a strong RNG. Neither output is more correct than the other. If a certain token is far more likely than any other, it's usually chosen even in the fingerprinted output.