4 ms·

The former. I'm not sure what you mean by metadata, but my expectation was that anything that Claude could put into the plaintext to identify itself may plausib

The former. I'm not sure what you mean by metadata, but my expectation was that anything that Claude could put into the plaintext to identify itself may plausibly also accidentally be produced by [a million monkeys on typewriters/one in a million human writers], since in the end, the writing is using the same language and symbols that humans use. How unique could the LLM possibly make it while still retaining its usefulness?

derefr 2mo ago
> How unique could the LLM possibly make it while still retaining its usefulness? They could be doing invisible and vaguely-harmless Unicode stuff. Insertion of zero-width joiners and non-joiners, replacement of regular spaces with non-breaking spaces, building spaces from multiple hairline spaces, intentional use of non-NFC-normalized codepoint sequences for accented characters, etc. Text with all this junk in it still reads the same; it just might wrap a little strangely, or not byte-match / collate correctly in a database (and Anthropic has never made a guarantee that their models would be capable of emitting text with these properties, so that’s fine.) And, importantly, no regular text or document editor would insert these things (especially in the useless places you could insert them for watermarking.) You only really see them in text that’s been explicitly typeset for a specific layout (e.g. in text-containing SVGs, website mastheads, or game HUDs) or for print publication. Of course, if this is the technique they end up using, then it’s very simple to strip it out by canonicalizing the text (i.e. Unicode-normalizing it + stripping out invisible layout characters + replacing “weird spaces” with regular ones, etc. Essentially the same thing many sites already do to user-generated content to prevent users from using Unicode features to break the page’s layout.

derefr 2mo ago

> How unique could the LLM possibly make it while still retaining its usefulness? They could be doing invisible and vaguely-harmless Unicode stuff. Insertion of zero-width joiners and non-joiners, replacement of regular spaces with non-breaking spaces, building spaces from multiple hairline spaces, intentional use of non-NFC-normalized codepoint sequences for accented characters, etc. Text with all this junk in it still reads the same; it just might wrap a little strangely, or not byte-match / collate correctly in a database (and Anthropic has never made a guarantee that their models would be capable of emitting text with these properties, so that’s fine.) And, importantly, no regular text or document editor would insert these things (especially in the useless places you could insert them for watermarking.) You only really see them in text that’s been explicitly typeset for a specific layout (e.g. in text-containing SVGs, website mastheads, or game HUDs) or for print publication. Of course, if this is the technique they end up using, then it’s very simple to strip it out by canonicalizing the text (i.e. Unicode-normalizing it + stripping out invisible layout characters + replacing “weird spaces” with regular ones, etc. Essentially the same thing many sites already do to user-generated content to prevent users from using Unicode features to break the page’s layout.