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How do you feel about ai watermarks à la Claude’s announcement. To me it feels like yet another huge eu overreach, even if Anthropic is happily participating. I know OpenAI is as well. To me it feels demeaning because it implies that if I use ai, that the content produced using it does not belong to me. As smart as AI’s get, if I use them, the outputs and productivity gain that comes from it should not be attributed to Claude. It should be attributed to the person that retrieved that output from Claude or ChatGPT etc. I know that’s apparently the case with intellectual property as companies wouldn’t use ai if they were concerned that ai providers would literally have some ownership of their goods / services. Though ai ideas can’t be copyrighted right? At what level of abstraction are you able to claim ownership of the idea you made with an AI?
I’m just frustrated all around - if they justified it with national security concerns or something re distilling, I may be onboard. But I WANT to use ai for everything - and watermarking all output makes that harder. It really sounds like (1) there are ways around it (2) all major model providers are going to be / are doing this to some extent.
And guess what? This pushes people who can’t afford a watermark to using open source models that don’t participate in arcane EU regulations. You’re just making students, authors, and others against the watermark move to another model provider to do what they want.
Honestly I understand the need to curate real human text, especially places like this, but increasingly the ai-using person becomes like a vessel to the model, using it to find some knowledge and communicate it outward, sometimes verbatim. They might think less deeply and understand stuff a little less than people rawdogging vocalizing their thoughts (like taking an airplane with no devices), but it’s still valuable. It sucks that people will soon be able to definitively say you were using ai output, honestly. Again, I get the hostility towards it, but i feel like if models keep improving at the pace they are, their language will start to sound more like the user.
It's silly legislation, because in practice it will only affect the absolute laziest of AI users in cases where people want their AI usage to not be detected. Run the text through an old fashioned machine translator, and back to English and get rid of most of the signal. Or have an open source model running locally on your machine paraphrase the writing paragraph by paragraph. (You probably don't even need a particularly smart model for this. 7b parameter models fed two or three sentences at a time to rephrase on a loop could probably do this on even potato hardware, since you're just laundering already written text.)
Plus, even if Anthropic will have the tools to tell if the watermark is present, they'll never be able to make those widely available for free to the public, since an adversary could just keep testing against their watermark checker until the text no longer looks like it has the watermark. That means that the presence of the watermark makes no difference in the vast majority of cases, even if you don't get rid of it, since very few people will actually have the means of checking for the watermark.
I think this describes quite a lot of people. Crucially, it will help a lot in education by making it so students can't just literally paste an AI response and receive full marks.
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