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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.
Generally? Yes. If they try to ban DeepSeek or regulate open models (including private hosting), that would be very bad (because I can't imagine how they'd non-invasively).
But for ChatGPT and Claude it's almost nonexistent, because when you use them
You already give up privacy.
The output is often obviously LLM, even if you prompt them to avoid the tropes. Survivorship bias I know, but if you can remove the LLM vibe, I'm sure you can remove the watermark.
More importantly, why does it matter to know something is AI generated? If that's the only information, it doesn't affect privacy. If the output is good, I promise most people won't care. And the holdouts, why do you care about their attention? like a black person trying to move into a sunset town, instead, let it be their loss.
I was in the national Korean War Memorial earlier today and noticed half of the exhibits had clear AI phrasing. Which is kinda nuts when it's only like 1000 words of English translated factual content required for the whole space and ostensibly it's the job of a lot of well-paid public servants to curate the exhibition. Who couldn't be fucked getting a manual translator/rephrasing it.
Do the common LLMs even produce the most obvious tells if you tell them to just translate a piece of text from language A to language B?
In my experience, yes, text translated by a general-purpose LLM tool often still sounds like it came from an LLM. Gemini will even go as far as restructuring the text into the "bullet points that each start with a bolded word or phrase" style it likes sometimes, without informing the user it's done so.
Huh. That'd suck.
FWIW, the free tier ChatGPT translated your comment to Finnish while keeping the structure reasonably close to the original (keeping in mind that Finnish grammar is completely different from English).
Doing the same to the OG comment results in stilted sounding text that nobody would write and some obvious translated grammar issues, but still no obvious LLMisms that I notice. Perhaps those depend on the used language?
Could be! Most of my experience has been reading/revising text translated into English by LLMs.
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