Crazy how a smart person like this fails to understand the gumbel softmax technique. It does not affect writing quality at all, provably. The very fact that there is generally no "best next token" with 100% certainty is precisely why the trick works (you cannot watermark a response to "respond with the To be or not to be soliloquy from the first folio Hamlet", for precisely this reason).
syrrimtoday at 10:19 PM
> I want any LLM I use to choose the very best, most precise words at every single decision point.
Then bad news: LLMs already use randomness in a fundamental way. Each time they go to generate a token, they first generate a probability distribution of possible tokens. Then they pick one randomly according to this distribution. The technique described can be thought of as making the random number generator pseudo random. The output it generates is one of the possible outputs it would have generated before, just now it's deterministic and will generate the same thing every time.
Imnimotoday at 11:16 PM
>I want any LLM I use to choose the very best, most precise words at every single decision point.
Does the author think he is currently getting T=0 output from Claude? Is he under the impression that T=0 produces the "best" writing?
This entire article just seems so detached from the basics of how LLMs work.
smallerizetoday at 10:15 PM
Translation: No one can ever again use Claude for proofreading their own prose unless theyâre willing to risk that the whole thing might be flagged as having been generated by Claude.
I think that was intended, yes.
aselimov3today at 10:26 PM
This article feels slightly incoherent. You want high quality precise writing and to use an LLM to generate it? Feels like those are diametrically opposed
egypturnashtoday at 11:36 PM
LLMs are already perversions of writing, so what else is new. Oh no, the over-long circumlocution generated by three autocorrects in a trenchcoat might be slightly longer because of this and maybe people will start noticing the subtle rhythms of vaguely peculiar word choices as yet another cue that you are wasting their time with machine-generated wordslop, what a terrible fate. Your long rambling walls of machine-waffling might be 37.05% longer than they need to be instead of the mere 36.58% longer they are now.
wewewedxfgdftoday at 11:39 PM
It's good to be the King.
And what I mean by that is that companies that are at the top tend to make anti customer decisions because they have lost the concept that pleasing customers matters as priority one.
bushidotoday at 10:28 PM
This is not meant to be snarky, But almost any writing done by Claude is a perversion of writing.
I honestly can't stand the way Claude writes. This watermark change just makes it scarier.
walrus01today at 10:22 PM
> I want any LLM I use to choose the very best, most precise words at every single decision point.
Try running an llm like qwen 3.8 27B in Q8 locally with an intentionally very low temperature setting, it will write like a caveman crossed with a robot. You may find that an extremely literal output does not look pleasant to read for humans.
arjietoday at 10:40 PM
It seems fine. I use an LLM to argue with me prior to posting blog posts so that I don't post obvious incorrectness, but the UX element to it is that it constructs notes about various sections of the text and we talk about those. There's no way for the generated text to enter the blog unless I copy-paste it and I'm not going to do that because the entire point is for me to write it.
At the point that you're generating entire volumes of text from Claude you're not really trying to be a sophisticated writer. I don't see how it's going to hurt for it to choose random related words.
nomeltoday at 10:08 PM
> The provider must mandate in their terms-of-service that users not remove the watermarking.
So, you don't own the generated text, and can't use it freely then. What if I copy paste a section, or rewrite a section of text to my liking? What if I rewrite some lines of code that contains the mark?
Security theater, and vague enough to be used as a weapon against who the government wishes.
I hope it's left off for non-EU customers.
lemarchrtoday at 10:50 PM
Some here are arguing that mechanisms used by LLM providers already derail the goal of "the very best, most precise words at every single decision point", therefore the author is misguided.
The author has expressed a preference. Assume that there is a sequence of tokens, such that it is considered the absolute best by the author. This particular method of watermarking makes it less likely to generate that sequence, by definition.
I feel their argument would have been clearer and stronger if they had spent more time exploring the alternatives, and whether these alternatives would be just as effective. It is trivially easy to remove invisible tokens.
Like it or not, there is a public good to being able to identify AI generated content, and a small degredation in quality is tolerable in my opinion.
I don't think anybody has to worry about this issue though. Manual writing, coding, and proof reading continues to be an option. Where AI output is nothing to be ashamed of, the tools are available. For everyone else, there will be LLM providers that ignore EU law.
capitalsigmatoday at 10:51 PM
> I chose to depend on a private company to express my own thoughts and now I'm mad that I'm not in control of the output
Who could have seen this coming???
codedokodetoday at 11:24 PM
Watermarks are garbage because they may embed account id, IP address and deanonimize you. That's why we should be using open-weights LLM whenever possible.
stabblestoday at 10:36 PM
Claude's writing was already easy to recognize. The fact that Anthropic complied without complaint makes me wonder if they already watermark their outputs and used the opportunity to create goodwill. Presumably they want to avoid training their new model on text generated by the previous model, so they have reasons to be able to recognize AI-generated text.
roywigginstoday at 11:30 PM
it serves to show just how little regard the people behind these generated-text fingerprinting schemes have for the actual craft of writing.
LLMs have never been the place I've thought to expect any commitment to the craft of writing, to be fair.
jacobgoldtoday at 11:28 PM
Watermarking will be one more nail in the coffin of proprietary models if the world is so fortunate.
Lots of faux outrage, rambling and hyperbole here from Gruber.
âAbsurdly and insultinglyâ? Come onâŠ
Planktonnetoday at 11:24 PM
There is no coherent position in which the watermarking is a perversion of writing but AI writing as a whole is not a worse one.
DarkmSparkstoday at 11:04 PM
I dont see how there would be remotely enough entropy in most model outputs for this to be close to feasible with any kind of accuracy.
Either they false positve on pretty much everything ever written, or the chances of catching a true positive is so low as to be useless.
Basically Cinavia for text, and that often falls over and is easy to remove even when there is megabytes of data streaming over a long period of time rather than 2 or 3 bits per wall of text, let alone what most people use claude for, when there is a strict dictionary and other tight output constraints.
pibakertoday at 11:25 PM
I think it's pretty dishonest of Anthropic to frame their watermark as EU regulation compliance. The EU regulation, from my understanding, requires AI content to be labeled for human viewers. In the meanwhile the Anthropic new release on the watermark says this.
> The difference between watermarked and un-watermarked text will not be distinguishable to readers
Which is to say, it does not actually meet the EU AI act requirements which require transparency to humans. Not to mention that if the detection requires access to the base models, it makes anthropic the only entity who gets the say on if a piece of text comes out of Claude. Anthropic is both the player and the referee here.
If there is one takeaway you should have from this fiasco it is that you should be wary of using tools that doesn't serve your needs and your needs only.
ghomsttoday at 11:28 PM
I'll be honest, who fucking cares? Why would you use AI to write for you and then complain that people know AI wrote the code?? If you know people wouldn't like it, why even try!?
4d4mtoday at 10:54 PM
Reminder: your favorite distilled model does not treat you, the customer, as an adversary and mess with your output.... May the free market win.
etchalontoday at 11:25 PM
The objection seems to be that Claude will always write worse prose than a human writer, even if the writing Claude generates is understandable.
> the only acceptable answer for why an LLM should choose bananas instead of pineapple (or coconut, or guava, or papaya...) is that it has determined that itâs the best fit for the intended meaning, tone, and sentiment of the text.
It already fails. It randomly picks between close candidates. To help fool people into believing in intelligence claim, I guess.
Finnucanetoday at 10:43 PM
"Anthropic's . . . Claude is a Perversion of Writing."
FITFY.
I have no sympathy for writers whining about what the AI is doing to 'their' writing. It's only your writing when you write it. There's any easy way to avoid this: don't fucking use it. Use you own brain.
LoganDarktoday at 11:06 PM
I keep seeing an irritating misconception in this space, which is that the alternatives chosen by these algorithms are supposed to mean the same things as what they're displacing. That's not true, and not how LLM generation works. Complaints that two different choices don't mean the same thing miss the entire point.
nian2326076today at 10:29 PM
[flagged]
jeffgrecotoday at 11:06 PM
Gruber has a ridiculous knee-jerk response to anything the EU does, so hardly a surprise he didn't come to the table with a sober facts-based response.
herftoday at 10:59 PM
Not telling someone you used AI is a perversion of writing. Also agree that an AI proofreader should not claim authorship, but in most other cases, the AI is not reading your mind, it's only watermarking its own usage, and we kind of need more of that.