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.
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.
You know, back in the era when proofreaders were human, I never one met a proofreader who rewrote my text afresh, rather than annotating the text with a pen.
It's still possible to use Claude to proofread - highlight grammatical, flow, structure, logic errors and make simple suggestions for you to pick and choose or adapt as you wish. No watermarking will flag your text. No flaw accusations of LLM authorship will haunt you. All will be fine.
But if you want an LLM to rewrite your text, that's (a) not proofreading, and (b) should be flagged as LLM generated ... because it is.
Where is the problem with using LLM generated text?
You could use your own hypothetical house elf to do it for you, or pay someone to do it. LLMs are just cheaper for a certain set of problems.
People will find ways to circumvent this, so this limitation will only hit the technically less adept people.
> Where is the problem with using LLM generated text?
In the fact that you didn't write it.
> You could use your own hypothetical house elf to do it for you, or pay someone to do it.
Yes, and those would be similarly problematic (and more expensive).
> In the fact that you didn't write it.
This is a fact and this is generally not a problem. Customer support guy Joe did not write that email to you with a refund: someone else did it and Joe did pick the template. Alice did not write that post card to Bob, someone else did and she just googled some nice text. We deal with a lot of content that wasn’t written by the person who signed it. That content, when written by LLM, may indeed contain watermarks and nobody will care about the choice of words, because only the meaning matters in such communications.
People pay too much attention to authenticity here, which is no more than a demonstration of an effort. LLM can and should write scientific articles because the real effort is in directing research, not summarizing it. LLMs can and should write news, because it is cheap and efficient, and real reporting is in discovery. LLM can and should write fiction and make movies, because there is no reason why creators of various junk should earn their money easily. LLMs do not replace real talent. They just emphasize for an average person how easily replaceable they are. And that‘s ok. Creative industry is a blue collar job now.
If it's not a problem, then there should be no issue with not concealing the fact, no? Lying about things one considers inconsequential is a useful signal about one's willingness to lie with little benefit.
If there was a ghostwriting detector, I would use that too.
Nobody says it's a problem. We'd just like to know.
Factory farming also makes meat cheaper than organic practices. I'd just like to know which one I'm getting.
Nonsense. Forget proofreaders. Think editors. In publishing some editors practically wrote the books. And then theres ghostwriting ! Think of that!
Part of me wishes we had the same regulation for ghostwriting etc. Nobody should be claiming to have written a book they didn't.
Okay, then it should be acknowledged if a work was AI-edited-written, or AI-ghostwritten.
I'm not sure the quoted statement is true. Proofreading like "point to problems in the text", if you fix the problems yourself and don't copy-paste the solutions given to you, should still be safe, shouldn't it? So, human-written text should not be falsely flagged if you use LLM for proofreading.
And if you copy-paste the answers from LLM, I think it's only fair the end result gets flagged. You're not writing it yourself.
> And if you copy-paste the answers from LLF, I think it's only fair the end result gets flagged. You're not writing it yourself.
I wonder if it would even get flagged in that case, because wouldn't the probability distribution of a token when the LLM is suggesting an edit to your writing be different than the distribution of that token once it is in the context of the text it's editing?
I don't even ask LLMs to go that far. Tell me if I've made a spelling, punctuation, or grammatical error, period. Don't rewrite a thing, because LLMs suck at that.
The question is, when is the "pro writer" version coming that lets you control this behaviour but costs more? Like night follows day, this will happen.
They will need to dodge around the EU requirements but it will probably just come down to an alternative method to watermark or a contractual assurance you won't mis-represent the source of the text.
I had the same thought.
I hope the other providers will add a geographical limitation on this EU rule.
(On a side note, I wish they would replace those EU beauracts with LLms).
Can't the LLM just generate e.g diffs? Or some other intermediate language. Then the watermark is lost when the translation step is applied.
Rands made this point a few days ago as I recall. Worries about having his tool corrupt his writing during editing, etc.
The thing that could change is interpreting "the whole thing as generated by Claude"
Well yeah, if it's output from Claude it's likely to get detected as being output from Claude.
It’s a strawman argument because if the LLM is really just “proofreading” for you, there will be little or no watermarked text in your writing. Not enough to trip the watermark detector.
wait what?
but proof reading is a linter, not a writer. the proof reader will say "I think this is clumsy can you try x,y & z"
It is quite just, if you think about it. Human works are copyrighted and protected at the moment of creation. All rights reserved. Yet, LLM outputs are uncopyrightable. Therefore, if Claude or any AI has processed my copyrighted work, the end result is uncopyrightable and in the Public Domain. The public has a right to know: is this a human copyrighted work, an LLM PD work, or is the human falsely claiming authorship in order to retain copyright?
A point of confusion for me, however: is every watermark unique? Is every algorithm for watermarking going to vary amongst models and amongst model versions? Will each model publisher keep this watermarking as a trade secret, that they alone can detect? If so, this can't scale! How do you detect "JoeBob 4.3 LLM" output? By querying every single model's watermark-detector? And if they all work by re-running the model and using tokens anew? That is extraordinarily wasteful.
If a watermark is not self-evident, or universally detectable, then it is no good. Take, for example, US currency. The security measures are published and well known. Any count-out room in retail has a big poster indicating how you can detect authentic US bills. Nobody has to accept non-US currency in the US, and so the only authenticity you need to worry about is your US bills alone. LLM watermarking has none of this in common. Currently sounding like a shitshow, if you ask me.
Perhaps LLM outputs are uncopyrightable, but derivative works of copyrighted works are not automatically in the public domain.
That's an intriguing twist, isn't it? It could lead to a tug-of-war.
Working backwards: if it is possible to confirm 100% confidence that a chunk of text is LLM output, then it is "PD until proven otherwise". How can a human reliably assert human authorship of their source text? When all watermark tests fail? Is that proof of humanity now?
If a human proves human authorship, and LLM watermarking tests positive, then is that going to be considered a "derivative work" or not? What if there is an applicable license for the source work, such as "CC-BY-ND" that prohibits derivative works?
This has not been court-tested, and I expect that it will need testing at that level before we can have any assurances.
How do you assert it now? I post some text on the internet, you claim you have copyright, how do you prove that?
Some camera pointing at you while you work. Guessing the camera needs to be watermarked itself, which can be done by adding some watermark on the chip level (each camera will have different watermark), manufacturer can confirm the watermark.
Is that realistically how that is proven in court today?
The watermark, if I'm understanding correctly, only proves that something has been touched at some point by a particular model, not that it was entirely generated by a particular model.
As for it being "uncopyrightable" if it were the output of an LLM, I think computer people are making a very aspie interpretation of a single decision. I think it's more that the LLM (and thereby its owners) cannot itself hold a copyright on its output, that output has to be touched by a person before it is copyrightable. A particular view from the top of a mountain can't be copyrighted, for example, but a photograph of that view can be.
I'm not sure it at all precludes a "robosigning"* sort of situation, where machines generate output, hired temps sign and claim that output, and immediately sign it over to the people who hired them (as a work-for-hire.) Copyright is stupid, artificial law, not logical.
-----
* https://www.mortgageauditsonline.com/what-are-robo-signers/
> The watermark, if I'm understanding correctly, only proves that something has been touched at some point by a particular model, not that it was entirely generated by a particular model.
For the watermark to be detectable, the text needs to be like 75% AI generated.
If you have an LLM “touch” one section of the article, it’s not gonna be detectable.
As I understand it, the current watermarking methods rely on a secret key, making the detection schemes a black box to anyone not in possession of the key. This means organizations like Anthropic are free to make any claim about authorship they want, true or not, and no one can call them on it.
Part of the legislation requires them to make a public AI text detector (ala GPTZero I assume).
Wouldn’t having that be enough to eventually reverse engineer the key?
Not if they designed the algorithm right.
Probably not to get the key, but you could certainly use it adversarially to remove the watermark.
Removal may come down to changing every third token to a different one.