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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.
If I did a task and used an electric light in the process of doing my work, I'd expect other people to still credit me for the task, rather than to say "you used a machine instead of lighting a torch, so you don't get full credit".
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