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Perhaps. But it seems like your beef is not with the presence of watermarking, it's with what people will use that watermarking for. You're not directly harmed
by sfink 1mo ago
Perhaps. But it seems like your beef is not with the presence of watermarking, it's with what people will use that watermarking for. You're not directly harmed by that blog post being labeled as AI generated. In a hypothetical (but unfortunately likely) world where everything has passed through an AI's digestive system, nobody would care.
In the meantime, it is true that this takes something away from you. But it's something you were only recently given. Now you're not given quite as much, but readers are given a little more (or rather, there's less being taken from us!)
> This is incredibly different than pure ai text.
Ok. But it's still incredibly different from pure human text. I guess the question is which provides more value? Providing the information "this text is AI watermarked" to readers? Or allowing creators to lie and claim that AI processed text was 100% human generated? I agree that people assuming that "has AI watermark" == "is AI slop" is incorrect and causes some amount of harm, but having the watermarks also pushes back on a large amount of harm already being done.
(Personally, I'm skeptical that these watermarks will ever hold up to adversarial attacks, and they haven't claimed that they will. So I think it's the usual "casual liars will be caught, determined liars will get an additional thin veneer of respectability".)
- altmanaltman 1mo agoI would push back on the fact that nobody would care. It is clear that platforms are increasing creating AI-generated as a category and it will only get more precise over time. Platforms that have built trust/aura over what type of content they host will resort to this more as they get more flooded with ai generated low effort content. I recently wrote a blog on this actually: https://decodingvibes.com/blog/aura-and-the-backlash-against-the-slop-machine/ https://decodingvibes.com/blog/aura-and-the-backlash-against...
- sfink 1mo agoI'm going to push back on your pushback and say you're not disagreeing with me. I was referring to a hypothetical future where everything has gone through AI to some degree, and for the purpose of the argument it has been modified enough to embed a watermark. Thus, the "detector" just always returns "true" in practice, and therefore nobody cares about what it says anymore. I think what you call "aura" in your essay is already very much a thing. We use the adjective "artisanal", for example. Artisanal, bespoke, heirloom. hand-crafted, small batch, ... we have many ways of trying to convey "aura". (Heck, even things like "minority-owned" or "woman-owned" are attempts to imbue an aura.) But more to the point of text, I'm also fascinated by the evolution of taste in this area. People's ability to detect AI slop improves, triggers revulsion to things they were previously fine with, and then sometimes they'll go back to being neutral once they start using AI more heavily themselves. Some AI writing is noticeably better quality than the human written version, yet it still smells of slop, and I at least am sometimes torn about which I prefer. Then there's the trend of AI writing getting better, substantially better, and sometimes at the same time worse in certain ways. Not to mention students, many of whom are now much more accustomed to AI writing than human writing -- it's their mental model of what an essay looks like, especially when all of their own essays uncoincidentally read like AI writing. And then there's all the nuance of the sometimes subtle differences between a wholly AI-generated piece of writing vs a heavily human-directed piece of AI writing vs an AI-edited piece of human writing vs a translated piece of human writing. It's fascinating and scary. I too am curious about the final question in your essay: "will such categorization lead to the development of a potential human premium?"