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Notes -
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.
This is actually - for maybe the first time ever - a case of "the innocent have nothing to fear". If you're not passing off AI work as your own, and being honest about the role of AI in your creative process, then a watermark isn't a problem. There are three cases you'd want to avoid a watermark: a) you are ashamed of your use of AI and trying to lie to your reader (in which case, good for the watermark), b) you are talking to a rabidly anti-AI crowd who will freak out at you just for using AI (what are you doing with your life, those people are not worth your breath), c) you have a philosophical objection to watermarks in general (understandable, but you have to accept that being the kind of guy who says "GNU/Linux" is not going to get traction in the wider population)
What I wonder about this is the extent to which the watermark causes performance loss in the model. 0.1%? 1%? 10%?
I don't know that this is entirely true. Anthropic also said that they were going to be noting AI generation in metadata. This means that if I paste in a text (that I wrote) into AI and tell it to produce it as Word document with any typos or errors redlined, and then I download and save that Word document, people may be given the (false) impression that it was wholesale produced by AI, even though I was only using it to proofread.
Similarly, even though in any individual case the odds of the watermarking process (which is just word selection) resulting in a false positive are low, the are greater-than-zero odds that someone gets unlucky (initially I wrote "unlikely," heh) and writes a sentence that has all the right (or wrong) words to flag it as AI generated.
OK yeah that's just real stupid of them. I would hope things would converge on a sensible equilibrium of "the metadata will say say 'claude made this document from the user's provided text'"
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