I’m against trying to “censor” LLMs, but yeah. What’s even the ostensible benevolent scenario for stripping invisible watermarking from Claude?

I can’t think of one, playing devil’s advocate.

It’s pretty scummy, indeed.

I am against AI and LLMs but the reason is quite simple, a lot of modern writing is offical bullshit to get stuff approved. Research grants, medical therapy approval, offical work mail that has to sound professional, job applications (insofar that noone cares what you write, they want a standard template and pick a candidate along qualifications anyways.). All these texts cost a lot of time and it makes no difference if a human or some copy machine writes it. And tbh. were it not for all the disadvantages of modern LLMs i would use it for the exact same reason, because sitting at a grant application for two hours while others do it in 5min is fucking useless and exhausting.

Okay.

I don’t agree. But let’s say I agree.

…Just don’t use Claude?

Use an LLM without a watermark; there are hundreds to pick from.

In other words, if one is going to try to hide automated writing, I think there should be a bare minimum effort to do so. That includes:

• Reading/checking the text, to see if it makes any sense.

• Actually trying to pass it as human.

90% of slop is brain melting slop because this minimum bar isn’t even met. And all Claude’s watermark would do is catch that bottom of the barrel; it wouldn’t censor anyone.

From what I understood you need statistical tests to detect the watermark. You cannot easily detect by eyeballing that a coin will land on heads 55% of the time instead of 50%

If it’s stuff that no one cares what you write, then they also won’t care if it’s proveably written by AI or not. So removing the watermark still does nothing beneficial.

AI traning on AI producing content is called poisoning and can be devastating even if a tiny part of the training set is poison. Stripping this mark makes AI companies unable to detect it as training poison, so it might make it posible for poisoning to occur on a larger scale, which is kind of inevitable as they’re scraping literally all they can & AI generated content is now inevitably part of the training pool

Ah, that explains why the article smells like an LLM wrote it.

I think the thing that frustrates me most about AI is that so many people seem to have forgotten that writers exist and wrote huge amounts of text - books, news articles, magazines - for centuries. But now, anytime someone writes a few cogent paragraphs, you get people screaming “AI!!! IT’S AI!!!”.

I know, because it has happened to me.

The article, to me, sounds like a competent author wrote it. Which is representative of a lot of the text LLMs were trained on.

I can’t tell you about the text, but the whole site is vibe coded. The CSS, the js, everything. Which doesn’t really inspire much confidence on the text, especially as it’s explaining how to bypass the claude detector.