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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.
Even if the value of someone acting as a "vessel" for Claude is greater than zero (which I'm personally not convinced of), we probably shouldn't apply the same norms we'd use for human-authored works.
Recently, a minor controversy erupted in the Apple enthusiast community when Miguel Behrer, developer of a little-known astronomy app called "DarkHours", accused a more famous developer named Terry Godier of copying his work. Godier had just released his own astronomy app called "Dark Hours" that was extremely similar to DarkHours. Behrer even pointed out a really specific bug in Dark Hours that had also been present in an earlier version of DarkHours.
If you took these developers at face value and assumed they had largely created these apps themselves (using AI "responsibly", while contributing a lot of their own skills and design taste), the obvious conclusion was that Godier totally ripped off Behrer. It was especially easy to believe this when Godier was caught in an unrelated lie about the App Store review team rejecting his app.
But, well, Godier later disclosed that his app had been almost entirely generated by Claude, and looking at Behrer's GitHub repo suggests that his app is also fully vibe-coded. So it's a lot more likely that, when two of Claude's vessels came to Him with similar requests for an astronomy app, that He chose in His superintelligent wisdom to deliver unto them pretty much the same app, bugs and all. It wasn't fair to accuse Godier of plagiarism simply because he was the second vessel to receive the app.
The best way to get ahead of stuff like this is probably to disclose the nature and extent of your AI use up front to people evaluating your work. Anthropic applying watermarks by default might help more people do that, even if they don't stop people who are determined to pass off Claude vesselry as human-generated work.
I think in AI's current iteration, it is less like acting as a vessel for the AI, and more like being the kind of boss who takes 100% of the credit for something your underlings did.
Industrialization and electricity gave us substitutes for servants to fetch water for us, light torches, fetch firewood to keep us hot, and fan us to keep us cold. LLMs are finally giving us a skilled, verbal servant we can boss around to do certain kinds of tasks. Perhaps the Hegelian idea of the master-slave dialectic applies here: in a certain sense, the servant doesn't need the master. He can see his impact on the world when he applies his skills and builds things. However the master needs the slave to recognize him as a master, and yet it can never be fully satisfying because he is only a slave. Except, now the slave almost certainly isn't a person, so the master has to farm out his recognition to people who want astronomy apps.
I don't think you've correctly understood the psychology at play. The boss always gets 100% of the credit for the things his underlings did. That's what being a boss is.
Bad bosses are usually bad because they're insecure, they can't get themselves out of the mindset that they should be visibly contributing and end up competing with their subordinates to everyone's detriment. The secure bosses know that the project's success is their success, that getting their underlings to do it well is their contribution. That there is no disparity between them getting 100% of the credit and their underlings also collectively getting 100% of the credit, even if the maths doesn't work out.
There's a tendency I've noticed amongst artisinal friends to assume their boss must secretly be jealous of them for all the skills they've acquired and he lacks. But that's not how it works. Their boss has all of those skills, he's using them right now. That they happen to be located in the bodies of other people is entirely besides the point.
I mean, I'm partial to the ancient Stoic line of thought encapsulated in Enchiridion 6:
Most bosses may, as a matter of fact, psychologically see all the virtues of their underlings as being, in some sense, their own virtues, but this is an error. (Seneca has a pretty good bit in letter 27 clowning on a rich Roman man named Calvisius Sabinus, who bought a bunch of slaves who were experts in Homer and Hesiod so he could always have an appropriate quote on hand when he needed it, since his own memory was terrible. I think it illustrates some of why this psychology is a bit flawed in practice. The people around Calvisius Sabinus could tell who actually knew anything about Greek literature, and his own stumbling attempts to repeat the lines he was fed only made him an object of ridicule.)
I think this doubly applies when talking about the same psychology applied to LLMs. LLMs are undoubtedly useful tools, but when I use an LLM agent to one shot the creation of a video game or something, I should be aware of which virtues are mine, and which virtues are those of the LLM. At best, I commissioned or arranged the creation of the game, but I didn't really create it in any meaningful sense. (Though, I will say that there are levels of LLM usage that might award me other titles. With the right kinds of effort, I could rightly say I "architected" or "designed" a vibe coded game, or any number of other job titles I could be proud of.)
I actually think that @Corvos has a point. Imagine that you are a modern self-employed digger without any boss. You probably utilize some sort of capital in form of excavator, that in turn utilizes labor of probably millions of people from iron ore processing to electronics. You are only good at operating this highly specific piece of machine, you would be nothing without it, you are "parasite" on labor of all those workers that produced the capital you now use. CEO like Elon Musk is just high-tier version of this digger. He is good not at operating a single machine, but at operation of huge gigafactories and software houses. That is his level of expertise, these companies are his capital and he is best in the world operating them.
Moreover, there is no world where position like that does not exist. You could be in Soviet Russia and you will have a local party boss managing the factory, who is subject to some planning committee that collectively represent Elon Musk on steroid as they produce 5 year plan for the whole economy.
What LLMs do specifically, is that they are just another vector of showing how intellectual property is nonsensical category. The solution is easy, the intellectual property belongs to the person who was first and fulfills any number of invented arbitrary rules for intellectual property (e.g. that it cannot be mathematical formula etc.). If it does not fulfill these criteria, then this app is freeware just as if you xittered some new mathematical formula. If it does fulfill these criteria then the app is his by virtue of being first and everybody else is plagiarizing his work. And it does not matter if it is an app or music or whatever.
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