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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.
Why do you feel this way?
The opposite of this seems obviously true to me. If you use an LLM, the content it produces is not yours. You cannot and should not take credit for anything that an LLM did. If you prompted Claude to do something, Claude did it, not you, and Claude deserves the credit.
(To the extent that machines can earn or accumulate moral credit, which they cannot. Claude deserves the credit in the same way that an earthmover deserves credit for moving a pile of rock.)
Why does it make it harder?
The only effect is that it means that other people will know that you used a bot. Why should that trouble you? You did use a bot. You don't seem to think there's anything wrong with using a bot, so why feel ashamed?
Do you understand that this sounds like, "It sucks that I can't deceive people by passing off a bot's work as my own"? Is it not obvious why people might not be sympathetic to that complaint?
I think this is a good way at looking at it, but people who use earthmovers to move piles of rock get credit for that work. They get paid for it, and they can say, honestly, "I went and moved those rocks." As long as everyone understands that they are not claiming to have done it by hand, it's a perfectly fine thing to say and take credit for and get paid to do. Of course, if someone does actually move all that earth by hand we hold them in a different level of esteem.
However if you said "I benched 250 today" and it was actually your tractor that did it, you'd be taking egregiously false credit. And I think that using AIs to do your writing is bad for the same reason that getting a tractor to do your exercising is bad. Sure, taking credit for something you didn't do is bad, but also you're not really improving by it.
If you are accomplishing a goal-oriented task, you want to use the best available tools for the job. There are some jobs for which LLMs are the best (or one of the best) tools to accomplish that task. I don't think that there is anything wrong with using LLMs and taking credit for the work in that situation, if there is an understanding that you're engaging in a field or a task where an LLM is an acceptable tool.
However there are other tasks where the task is the goal. Nobody is getting paid to post on the Motte, and the point of this forum is to discuss and sharpen ideas with other people - if anyone wants to talk to an AI, they can do it themselves on their own time, but perhaps more importantly, if the forum devolves into AIs shouting at each other, nobody's really improving by it.
This still depends on how someone uses the ai, no?
If you just copy the conversation and say: argue against person X, then that seems fairly meaningless for a discussion forum.
Using the AI to do something like summarizing some data relevant to the discussion seems like an unambigously good thing for the quality of discussion.
Then you could outline some points against against some argument and ask the ai to flesh them out a bit and then lightly edit the output. Is that worse than someone not posting at all? Is it better than just a list of bullets points?
What if someone has a long conversation with an AI trying to refine the point of their post before posting, is that good or bad?
Correct.
Yes, I agree, as long as you can check and cite to the output. I've used AI to do research before for some of my posts on here; at this point it's pretty much a better search engine (in part because search engines have gotten worse). But I don't let it write them.
I think this is lazy and based on my experience of when people actually do that in here, worse than someone not just posting at all.
I don't think this is necessarily bad, but it's on the top of a slippery slope to posting a lightly-edited AI-generated text, which I don't like. If an article that you read or a conversation you had serves as a jumping-off point or ideation focus for a Motte-post, I think that's fine, and an AI text may happen to do that, although I would use a lot of caution. AI fact-checking your post may also be good. I don't think quoting from an AI (as long as it's treated the same way as any other external source, e.g. Wikipedia - put in a quote box or with quote marks and noted as a source) is necessarily a deal-breaker: if your post is mostly Wikipedia I think it should be treated the same way as a post that is mostly AI unless you have a very spectacular way with words. But generally speaking I want the words and thoughts to be yours.
Note that I am not trying to invent rules, just lay out what I am looking for in this discussion forum personally (and in discussion generally).
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Sometimes I will go ask Gemini for sources for something or another, but I still have to go look at the sources and reference them if I try to use them in an argument here. The argumentation has to be mine. I do not want this forum to turn into AI arguing with itself based on the biased inputs of its prompters.
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Using the AI to find a reliable source of the relevant data, and you presenting the data together with that source, would be far more valuable to the quality of discussion.
When we post on the Motte, we argue, even as we do whatever we can to not antagonize. If you post a summary of some crucial data that supports your argument and goes against mine, then either I get convinced by your data (and soften my position on the argument), or I question your data. None of the AI produce the data themselves, what sources (if any) are they using? How reliable are those?
Come to think of it, the argumentative nature of the Motte gives a reasonable guidance to appropriate AI usage. If I assume that my respondent may disagree with my position, and I genuinely wish to discuss an issue on which you'll disagree, I need to build trust and maintain transparency. In a text-based forum format, nothing undermines trust more right now than the suspicion that one is talking to a chatbot, so I would steer away from using AI for any editing. (I have found myself fondly noticing spelling and grammar errors. I don't make any on purpose, but I am sure I have dropped an article somewhere in my post.) I don't see any issue with using AI to search for evidence (data, quotes, whatever), it makes for a good search engine, so long as I ask for links to sources, check the source, and present it to my respondent.
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Yes, that is substantially worse than not posting at all. Why is it so difficult to understand that people do not want to argue with robots? That inlcudes your personal bespoke pet robot you're really proud of. I do not care what Claude or ChatGPT thinks. It does not matter how "good" the end product is. It doesn't matter how well it passes the Voight Kampff test. I'm here to discuss ideas with individuals. I want to talk to you, not a carboard cutout of you with an LLM-powered speaker where your mouth should be.
Imagine you were having a discussion with an old friend at the coffee shop and partway through they just get up without warning and swap out with some minimum wage employee wearing a "high I'm [friend]" nametag. They've got some notes your friend wrote down to guide them through the discussion, and promise to share everything with your friend later. Are you still having coffee with your friend? Why is this not just as good as hanging out with an old buddy? Hell, this new guy is actually a lot smarter than your real friend.
Just fucking have a conversation without moderating it through a computer program. If it's sloppy and dumb, so be it; I'd rather read that than whatever polished AI slop you would have posted instead.
I already said that feeding the discussion into an AI and telling it to argue with someone feels meaningless. Your coffee shop analogy is basically that case.
This isn't a coffee shop or even a chat room. It's a very text-heavy asynchronous forum that rewards long, detailed posts, often written as much for the audience as for the person being replied to. People are posting at each other rather than having anything resembling a normal conversation, more often than not, and apparently that style is rewarded strongly enough that posts which look more or less entirely AI generated can get heavilybupvoted and are rarely called out.
So in that context, what exactly is the boundary? If the points and reasoning is human, and AI is helping turn them into the kind of text this forum actually rewards and wants to read, at what point are you no longer arguing with a human? Spellcheck? Grammarly? Rephrasing a sentence? Writing in another language and translating it with AI? Turning bullet points into prose? Refining your argument through a conversation with an AI but writing the motte post on your own?
"I want to talk to you, not a robot" doesn't really answer that. It assumes the forum is some direct human-to-human conversation to begin with, and then skips over the actual question of when assistance with the text becomes replacement of the person.
Finally, you say you'd rather read something "sloppy and dumb", but I'm not sure that's actually the norm here; it certainly doesn't seem to be the preference revealed by the voting. Some kinds of obvious AI output get downvoted, but other posts that look only barely less AI generated get heavily upvoted. People seem quite happy to reward machine-mediated text when it's in the style they like and it makes points they agree with.
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Perhaps it was a bad example. Using or piloting an earthmover does require skill, and the job that you use an earthmover in is certainly one that deserves compensation.
I hope you understand the point I'm getting at, at least. The human is doing some work in that situation, but that work is not physically digging out and lifting tons of earth.
Surely an insignificant amount of work compared to digging it by hand.
How are LLMs not a similar tool resulting in a productivity gain?
All these arguments look like "we need to make sure people are seeing a photograph and not a hyper realistic painting, because otherwise they won't realize one just pressed a button". Art aside, who cares if they just pressed a button?
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