alt Hacker NewsI do not understand why people remain so up in arms. AI generated text being watermarked is universally good.
What benefit is there to people believing that LLM text was actually human written?
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> generated text being watermarked is universally good.
If it worked perfectly, maybe you could make this argument in a vacuum.
It does not work perfectly. (It cannot. It is by definition a heuristic). That means there will be false positives. There is a chance those false positives ruin someone's career. See [0] for just how easy it is to push SotA "AI text detectors" in one direction or another.
Now, with watermarks, instead of everyone to some extent understanding that AI text detectors are wishy washy woo, they are now Anthropic certified to detect an official AI watermark.
With that kind of false confidence in hand, the people who trust the "computer says you plagiarized" machine are never going to believe you when you say "it can make mistakes," they're just going to fire you/take away your scholarship/cancel your grant/...
This is all beside the fact that we should demand our tools work for us and not for some shadowy master. "Universally good," absolutely not.
[0]: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-wouldnt-say-pangram-i...
Because the incentive has been changed from the true best output always, to a mix of "close to the best but not always" output.
For the (majority) of us using Claude models for computing as a tool, obviously we're not going to be thrilled that our new tool will perform worse going forward.