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What happens if someone handwrites a Claude output, then someone uses that handwritten text as a reference. Now you've got a watermarked idea which may have no
by w_for_wumbo 2mo ago
What happens if someone handwrites a Claude output, then someone uses that handwritten text as a reference.
Now you've got a watermarked idea which may have no direct linkage to the usage of Claude.
- phainopepla2 2mo agoHow is that different from referencing digital text that someone copied and pasted from Claude?
- w_for_wumbo 2mo agoBecause there's an expectation of authenticity from the written word. If you've referenced something handwritten, you don't expect it to be the output of an LLM. Similarly, if you quote someone word-for-word, you wouldn't anticipate their words to be flagged as Claude content, but if someone memorized Claude output word-for-word. That would still be classified as a Claude output. Going forward you could categorize the influence of Claude on a population based off a percentage match between their spoken words with the LLM prose.
- dns_snek 2mo agoAre you worried about being accused of using LLMs to generate your work? As long as you don't plagiarize you have nothing to worry about.
- AlecSchueler 2mo agoWhat if I unknowingly read content written by Claude in various articles and it influences my own writing style?
- Cthulhu_ 2mo agoI'm not too sure about that, people making stuff have already gotten penalized by overzealous AI detectors, most recently Kurtzgesagt.
- dns_snek 2mo agoThose aren't based on a recognisable watermark but dumb heuristics.
- platinumrad 2mo agoYou can't make a blanket statement like this without knowing how the watermark is implemented.
- dns_snek 2mo agoWhy not? I'm assuming that the watermark detector won't have plausible false positives on human-written text otherwise it won't have much merit to begin with. If a detector flags something in your text and you've properly attributed that text to another author then what is there to worry about?
- platinumrad 2mo agoIf you take it as given that the watermark detector won't have "plausible false positives" then, sure, your argument becomes trivial. I'm not taking that as given.
- dns_snek 2mo agoI'm not taking anything as given. If it suffers from false positives then you have nothing to worry about because the signal won't have any merit -- just like existing AI detectors today. If it doesn't suffer from false positives then you have nothing to worry about because your text won't be detected.
- platinumrad 2mo agoThese things aren't binary. There is a large middle ground, which is where Pangram sits today. It's good enough to be useful, but I absolutely would not be willing to fail a student on the basis of a Pangram positive. If you are implying that this Claude watermark may be good enough to enter the "evidence to fail a student" category then we have a major disagreement.
- TheOtherHobbes 2mo agoIf the algos work as advertised, watermarked token sequences have an extremely low probability. Copying the words by hand doesn't change that. The mechanism seems to survive editing. The extreme probabilities get a little less extreme, but are still extreme enough to be distinctive. But it wouldn't survive paraphrasing, because the output would be entirely human and the token correlations would disappear. It might not survive referencing if only a sentence or two is used. The practical issue is how true the claims are. It's one thing to create a proof of concept, another to see how it works in use. And this is potentially catastrophic for code, because the grammar and word choices of code are completely different and more fragile than standard English.