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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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