alt Hacker News> We will soon be offering a watermark detection API. We’re in the process of working out the details of its implementation.
Dumb question - doesn't this defeat the purpose of a watermark? i.e., anyone who wants to avoid detection can simply run `while (has_watermark(text)) text = slightly_rewrite_with_non_anthropic_llm(text)` until it's gone? I feel I am missing the intent of the watermark if it is so easily defeated.
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It's completely pointless without an API, unless you're thinking the API should be private or restricted. The public needs some way of identifying the watermark.
> anybody who wants to avoid detection can just
They can just use a different LLM. By far easier and more reliable than what you're suggesting. This whole watermarking requirement is better then nothing because meant people are profoundly lazy, but yes it is not hard to work around with any effort.
> anyone who wants to avoid detection can simply run `while (has_watermark(text)) text = slightly_rewrite_with_non_anthropic_llm(text)` until it's gone?
What do you think the pricing per call of "has_watermark(...)" will be?
https://x.com/i/status/2087235360690741690
An important principle: Never pay someone to remove a problem that they themselves created
> while (has_watermark(text)) slightly_rewrite...
I understand what you are trying to say but I am not sure any watermark detection API would definitively return a true/false answer, I would have expected something more like a numeric confidence value. I am also not sure if the API would be deterministic.
Not sure either why they are providing an API to detect either and what you say make sense.
However, if my understanding is correct, the reason for the watermark / detections is that its not directly aimed at end-users, but to be able from them to detect if text was produced by one of their models so they don't use it as input in training data. So, yeah, in that context, not sure why they are announcing this with an ability for anyone to detect if it was produced by one of their models. Also, they are happy to ingest text produced by models they don't own? Maybe someone with more information can elaborate?
I thought the same thing. Maybe they can restrict it so that you can’t run the same text through multiple times with only one word differences. At least from an IP perspective that would start to get really expensive to rotate through IPs to get around a block like that.
Yeah kinda. You cant be confident a negative is true.
It doesn’t undermine positives though. That’s just whatever the false positive rate is.
So if it comes back as anthropic generated, it most likely is. If it comes back as non-anthropic generated, we have no idea.
If anthropic didnt make it public there would only be a narrow path for governments or something to make requests. Its kind of fucked either way.