alt Hacker NewsIt’s fully possible I didn’t explain it very well in the first place, but he is making a wider point.
The point I made (quite briefly) is that watermarking is only feasible because for good writing it is necessary to use T>0, or the writing will never explore a more creative choice, and that at T=0 you don’t even need a watermark to spot LLM-generated text.
The point he is making is consistent with this, isn’t it? Either you allow temperature to drive creativity, consistently in a way that can be influenced and analysed, or you adulterate that process for the purposes of meeting a corporate/legal directive, in a way that is proprietary and obscure. These are ethically distinct approaches, and since he disagrees with the EU objective he comes down on one side I guess.
Me, I don’t care about the hypothetical enough.
Not least because I think Claude writes depressingly badly and I doubt any steganographic change will enrage me less.
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No, you are jumping to conclusions about how watermarking works. This is some audiophile thinking that because your RNG is “pure”, you get text with an expansive soundstage or whatever. Intuitively this may be true or false depending on your personal prior but you’d need to show it mathematically. The overall token distribution shouldn’t change and the frequency at which you see the word “load-bearing” will remain the same.
What does he think of all the other adulterations of LLMs that already happen?
The point he is making is not consistent with understanding how temperature influences LLM text generation, no.
He repeatedly states that choosing "the best word" is the most important thing to him. I don't know how you reconcile that with creativity itself, let alone probabilistic sampling.