HN

Comments (206)

• Menu

  voidUpdate
  > "The exact words we choose when writing matter."Then write your own damn text if you care about the exact wording so much
• Menu

  syrrim
  > 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.
• Menu

  levocardia
  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).
• andOlga
  What a truly bizarre article. Arguments about pre-existing randomness, temperature and whatnot aside, I simply cannot comprehend what the author here really thinks the "best word" is. There's no such thing. We humans fall on familiar patterns of writing ourselves, so we may forego something with a flourish in favor of a more commonly-used word unless we put in effort to be "special", which should be used sparingly. That is to say, human writers are likely to choose a "worse" word in far more than the supposed 51% of cases, and that has no effect on the actual quality of writing in the end.But even if there were such a thing as a truly "best word", for some context, what are the examples here? Mango vs pineapple? Gray vs overcast? In what case is one of these better, that AI would normally infer but would suddenly be "perverted" by SynthID? Do you think your emotional state and preferences are being evaluated if they aren't explicitly in memory? And if they are there, do you think that the generator will bypass those instructions in favor of the watermark instead of placing it somewhere you won't care? I just. Genuinely don't get it. There may be words that matter in specific contexts or to you as a reader, so you should bloody well put them there.
• Menu

  Imnimo
  >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.
• Menu

  smallerize
  Translation: No one can ever again use Claude for proofreading their own prose unless they’re willing to risk that the whole thing might be flagged as having been generated by Claude.I think that was intended, yes.
• armchairhacker
  Are there some narrow cases (like in outputting the input almost verbatim) where the probability for every best token is always much higher than second best, and in those cases would there be no watermark?
• Menu

  inigyou
  > One of my fundamental problem with this is that no two synonyms carry the exact same meaning. “He leaped at the chance” and “He jumped at the opportunity” are very similar sentences expressing the same general sentiment, but they are not the same. The exact words we choose when writing matter.Then why are you using an LLM to write? They're not capable of understanding such nuance. They do pick randomly between two synonymous phrases, they do not use some super smart algorithm to pick the one that sounds the best.This excuse doesn't hold any water at all - Occam's razor says the author is just super annoyed that his AI writing will be identifiable as AI writing.
• Menu

  aselimov3
  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
• Menu

  amanzi
  I was initially surprised that Gruber was so invested in the "quality" of AI-generated text, which in my mind is an oxymoron. But really, Gruber's interest here is with the EU. This forms part of his ongoing attacks on the EU, all because they have been forcing Apple to align with regulations.
• egypturnash
  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.
• Menu

  bushido
  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.
• Menu

  slhck
  The fact that Gruber points to a "must-read" article about how the watermarking works, which, in turn, was very obviously entirely LLM-generated, says a lot about his lack of experience reading LLM output.If Gruber can't tell a fully AI-generated article from a human-written one, perhaps he shouldn't care so much.NB: I was told yesterday it's apparently a meme to call out Claude-generated output, but here I am, as I believe it's quite relevant to the topic at hand.
• Menu

  bagacrap
  > But only Anthropic will be able to determine if text was seemingly generated by Claude, and Anthropic will only be able to detect the watermarks that are applied by Claude. Claude can’t detect the hidden watermark signals generated by, say, Gemini, and Gemini can’t detect the hidden watermark signals created by Claude, because each implementation is predicated on secret keys held only by the LLM providerWell, akshwally...> Interoperability. Providers must implement an interoperability solution for watermark detection such as a standardized API access method, a publicly readable signpost mechanism embedded in content, or participation in a consortium detection solution by February 2, 2027
• arjie
  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.
• roywiggins
  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.
• Menu

  nomel
  > 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.
• capitalsigma
  > 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 outputWho could have seen this coming???
• jeffgreco
  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.
• otterley
  I often agree with John Gruber, but I think he’s lost the plot with this one.The thing I don’t understand is why he seems to care so damned much about this subject--enough to write over 4,500 words on it!John writes for a living. That’s his profession. He’s been writing for over 25 years now. When you’re that good at writing, and you care this much about your writing, you don’t allow an LLM to take over your job. I just can’t imagine that he’s in the market for LLMs and that literary excellence is his number one selection criterion.So why is he so livid about it? It’s like being angry that wine is going to start coming in smaller bottles even though you don’t drink wine.Even if he’s angry on behalf of other people, I don’t get it either. In my view, having LLMs write publishable content on your behalf is not a socially-acceptable use case, nor a professionally-acceptable one in most professions, even though people are abusing it for this purpose anyway. And besides, the models aren’t even all that good at it today. If you agree with that, then you certainly should not care if it’s using different phrasing than you otherwise might prefer if the meaning is similar enough.I can't help but wonder if perhaps his hatred of EU technology regulation (which, admittedly, is mostly pretty dumb and is mainly just making life worse for users) is getting the better of him.
• Planktonne
  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.
• stabbles
  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.
• Menu

  walrus01
  > 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.
• Menu

  jacobgold
  Watermarking will be one more nail in the coffin of proprietary models if the world is so fortunate.Reminds me of printer tracking dots.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots
• robomc
  This is moronic. This is like being mad that the slot machine you think is lucky is occupied.
• DarkmSparks
  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.
• Menu

  codedokode
  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.
• beej71
  I guess I understand the complaint, but LLMs are already crap at writing, IMNSHO. And, yes, maybe this will make them marginally more crap, but in my mind we're talking the difference between a 30% grade and a 29%.
• dexterlagan
  I needed another reason to cancel my Claude sub. Thanks Anthropic!This is akin to adding a giant watermark on things one would made with a free product "Made with XXX". Except you're paying $200/month for it, and there's no way to disable that watermark.I don't disagree with EU regulations, but I strongly believe the onus should be on the content publisher, not the toolmaker. If the toolmaker watermarks whatever his tool produces, it opens a giant can of worms that cannot be closed. That means anything and everything you make with this tool is no longer fully yours, it contaminates everything and makes your work traceable. Who wants that?I was already annoyed by the fact that Claude marked everything it did on my repos under its own account (I didn't ask for any of this), but now everything is invisibly marked, even the code. Not that I care that my writing would be watermarked, since I'd rather write my stuff myself, but code? No thanks.Meanwhile I'm running a DeepSeek V4 Flash or Pro, or a Qwen3.8, and it writes my code without a peep. Resulting repos are clean, just the way I want them. No 'Claude' account, no watermarking, nothing. I won't be looking back after having tried these new models. Whoever makes good models that don't broadcast their maker will get my business.This watermarking will simply push people more towards Chinese models. Keep pushing in the wrong direction Anthropic. Doing this right before an IPO is a great idea.
• Menu

  lemarchr
  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.
• nojs
  There are many reasons to hate this watermarking but affecting the output quality isn’t one of them. The central argument he’s making is wrong. Switching out one RNG for another doesn’t make the results worse.
• tacker2000
  Lots of faux outrage, rambling and hyperbole here from Gruber.“Absurdly and insultingly”? Come on…
• Menu

  aenis
  The same absolute morons who gave us cookie consent strike again.I swear, one of those days I will get into politics just to fight those two things, and the cottage industry of batshit crazy lawyers that gave birth to those things.
• wewewedxfgdf
  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.
• 0x_rs
  I'd encourage reading this paper, and literature on scaling laws in autoregressive models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.11156Total variation distance has been measured to decrease as you scale a model, and that is the primary mechanism "watermarking" as discussed in the Anthropic announcement relies on. It becomes more difficult to reliably detect text as a fixed sample count without tweaking the distribution further. Either way, it's a minor problem that will be addressed over time, compared to the issue of who can detect this without guessing or developing their own sets: providers not releasing a way to detect any such watermarks without going through them makes this entire approach hostile to the public. The EU regulation on this subject is interesting, although again most certainly not the primary driver for these practices:"1.1.2: Signatories will ensure that AI-generated or manipulated content is marked with an imperceptible watermark, with the exception of very short text. For free-form text longer than 200 tokens, watermarking still needs to be applied, even though it may have lower reliability compared to that of watermarking very long text"A proper, effective and useful law would have required providers to regularly release datasets to run your own verification on any text released within a fixed interval of time, presumably once out of rotation. Instead, it only talks about exposing an user interface going through their own services:"Signatories will ensure access to their detection solution through a user interface appropriate for the audience of end-users that may eventually be exposed to the content generated or manipulated by their AI system. [...] Any restriction to the access will be limited in time until more reliable and robust detection mechanisms have emerged and have been adopted as the state of the art for detection mechanisms for the watermarking of free-form text evolves."Most interestingly, in line with the EU's mass-surveillance program, an alternative solution to watermarking where it may not be sufficient is also suggested, although only optional for now:"Where appropriate and taking into account potential trade-offs related to privacy and security, as well as scalability challenges and costs, Signatories may implement as an optional supplementary measure fingerprinting or logging solutions for AI-generated or manipulated content which allow for checking whether content has been generated or manipulated by their AI system. For example, direct logging may be appropriate for text content, whereas fingerprinting approaches may be preferable for audio and visual content."
• dmix
  I will be happy to move off Anthropic given the chance. They are burning all of their good will.
• Menu

  andy99
  I don’t understand how this works for anything but prose. Is that the point? In any code or structured output, there just isn’t the flexibility, and depending on how the user requests the output be constrained there is even less (“answer only True or False”). So is it just chat responses? If I ask the API to tell me a story about Alice and Bob then it watermarks it, but when I ask it some implausibly constrained thing like write a story about Alice and Bob with each word starting in rotation with the letters alicebob, does it try to do so and hope there are roughly équiprobable tokens regularly?
• Menu

  4d4m
  Reminder: your favorite distilled model does not treat you, the customer, as an adversary and mess with your output.... May the free market win.
• rsynnott
  ... If watermarking is a perversion of writing, what does that make 'writing' with an LLM?
• Menu

  pibaker
  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 readershttps://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-text-watermarkWhich 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.
• brcmthrowaway
  Wow, never has a single article revealed the incompetency of a tech writer.
• micromacrofoot
  gruber is really out of his element with ai commentary, I fully support the general skepticism but he's seemingly arguing against something he doesn't quite grasp
• etchalon
  The objection seems to be that Claude will always write worse prose than a human writer, even if the writing Claude generates is understandable.Yeah, John. We're all OK with that.
• veidr
  This (Anthropic's "watermark" stance, I mean) is so fundamentally ludicrous that I have assumed it is a (wholly insincere, but arguably pragmatic, at least from their perspective) attempt to deal with the EU and their latest misguided, ham-fisted attempt to solve a real-world problem by drenching the entire world with more regulatory slop[1].The "watermark" can be trivially defeated, but may be enough to satisfy the letter of the law, and like many people here, I would argue that if you are letting Claude write for you, you've already accepted getting the literary equivalent of turd soup, so the harm is — or at least could be — fairly minuscule.[1]: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/code-pract...(FWIW I have a more favorable view than most people seem to of the EU's efforts to at least try tackle problems like this — but predictably, the bureaucratic "solutions" they come up with don't work, but do make things objectively worse)
• ChrisArchitect
  Related:How Claude's text watermarking workshttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49303350
• pizzly
  Now for the human generated watermark. Timez to addd the speelling mistakes, decreaze the usegage of big words and proper gramicaly usuage. Wish I was joking.
• ghomst
  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!?
• chrisjj
  > 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 it’s 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.
• snickerbockers
  What is even the point of watermarking AI slop supposed to be? All it does is provide people with the false implication that anything which is not watermarked must not be AI-generated.I struggle to see how this could possibly be useful unless there's some sort of psy-op going on to trick people into uncritically accepting anything lacking a watermark as not being AI-generated.
• LoganDark
  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.
• Finnucane
  "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.
• runtime_lens
  [dead]
• nian2326076
  [flagged]
• vancekai
  [dead]
• wasabi991011
  > because the nature of the watermarking algorithm requires it to sometimes increase the probability of selecting a worse word choice and decrease the probability of selecting the model’s best choice.... and the opposite is also true, sometimes it will increase the probability of choosing the "best" word choice. So watermarking makes the LLM quality better then? /s
• Menu

  RegardDetector
  [flagged]
• Menu

  avazhi
  Anthropic should just pull out of the EU at this point. Europeans who really want to use it can VPN, and if they did they wouldn’t be able to hide behind their various comical tech laws.Nanny state nonsense indeed.As a non American/non European resident all I see from the Europeans are 0 contributions to software progress at any large scale while they surely do a lot of crying and huffing and puffing and demanding. Lots of complaining and rule making but not a lot of creating is a bad look.
• Menu

  akersten
  Respectfully, you are all missing the point.Watermarking is bad not just because of the principled stance that your tool should not be working against your own interests (the passionate argument in TFA), but specifically because it lends credence to the idea that AI detection is a valid and possible thing to do perfectly.As technologists of course we know "oh well yes but with some confidence interval we can detect AI token bias across a large corpus of text." To JimBob in charge of publishing your paper or reviewing your PhD submission, all he knows is "anthropic says AI detection is possible so this 30% chance your paper was written by AI means you've plagiarized." Do you really think you're winning the argument with the certified, law-approved plagiarism detection machine? No, you're not, and your career is over.It's irresponsible to develop watermarking because it is not anywhere close to a perfect science, but it will be treated like one by people with the power to ruin your lives. Even if you've never touched AI in your life, your paper is going through the "maybe it says you cheated" box, and you better hope those dice don't come up snake eyes.
• herf
  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.