Watermarking, My Ass

1st from the New York Times:

This Is One of the Most Important Policy Decisions of Our Lifetime

These A.I. Policies Will Hurt Our Business. We Should Do Them Anyway.

Written by Bridgewater Investments, which has apparently invested $B in GenAI companies. This strikes me as yet more hype: AI is going to take over the world, so here's how we should tax it. Regardless of their motives, I'm going to say, token tax, hell yeah! Labor is taxed, LLMs should be also.

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From the ever reliable Gary Marcus, more crappy hype from the King/Queen of Hype, Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei :

No, Dario Amodei, we will not be curing cancer and “most human disease” in five to ten years

What Amodei either ignores or doesn’t know about medicine

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Wow! Anthropic was surging ahead of OpenAI. So happy to see them self-immolate.

1st, from Doc Searls:

You can hear the squeak of sphincters closing

How Claude marks AI-generated content is the most self-destructive utterance I’ve ever heard coming out of an AI company. Gary Isaac Wolfe (who contributes a comment below): “Anthropic watermark scheme appears as a comic policeman blowing his whistle while his pants fall down and Mark Pauline loads a cannon with rotting fish.”

But maybe that’s a good thing. Let’s start with that police whistle:

When a supported Claude model generates text, it weaves an imperceptible watermark directly into the text itself. You won’t see it, and it doesn’t change the meaning, quality, or readability of Claude’s response.

Because the watermark is part of the text, it will travel with the text when it’s copied and pasted elsewhere, and may persist through some editing. Watermarking will be applied at the model level, which means it will be present no matter which Claude product or surface the text comes from.

Will any writer, of anything, ever want to use any Claude text anywhere now? I’ve been a satisfied Claude customer, and I’m ready to bail completely. And I’m not alone. Because watermarks in text are invisible time bombs ready to scream, “The author didn’t write this! I did!” when some reader of the writer’s text uses the right probe.

All the times I have read how writers go over & over their text to pick the 1 perfect word, the 1 perfect phrase. Clearly not a concern for Claude when it processes words as nothing but statistics, to be altered however is desired, as long as the statistics are still OK. Semiotic zombies, FTL.

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404Media also weighs in on this unbelievably ... arrogant ... lame ... delusional??? idea of Anthropic:

Anthropic’s Text Watermarking Proves AI Companies Do Not Care at All About Writing

AI companies see words as interchangeable and have zero clue how to judge the “quality” of writing.

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“Nothing is added to the text and there are no hidden characters,” Anthropic wrote in that company blog post. “The difference between watermarked and un-watermarked text will not be distinguishable to readers.” The way it will work, the post explained, is that Anthropic will subtly alter the word choices in AI-generated text in a way that is only known to Anthropic and its algorithms. Anthropic will know the watermarking algorithm, which will change “the source of the randomness used to pick among words” and thus can write a tool to detect whether something has been AI-generated.

So Anthropic is encoding secrets in every piece of text it produces for you??? This is semiotics on steroids, Claude is indeed a semiotic zombie. The arrogance of this is to me incomprehensible. Just say no.

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #142.