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I could see this being useful in a world with a few AI providers. However, in a world of commodity AI models, can simply use a model from an AI provider that do
by gizmo686 1mo ago
I could see this being useful in a world with a few AI providers. However, in a world of commodity AI models, can simply use a model from an AI provider that does not watermark. Or download any open source model and run it themselves [0].
The only practical use I can see for this in the world we actually live in is to prevent model collapse. Most people using AI don't care if people training future AI ignore them, so would have no incentive to switch to providers that do not watermark. Of course, this disencetivises all if the pro-social applications of this technology, and risks giving the big providers a monopoly on "known human" data, which has serious antitrust implications.
[0] Note that the watermark is not inherent to the model itself, but rather how the model is run. So this teqnique cannot be used by people providing open-weight models. It would need to be used by those actually running the models.
- dylan604 1mo agoThis seems like a know your audience situation. >However, in a world of commodity AI models, can simply use a model from an AI provider that does not watermark. Or download any open source model and run it themselves That's seems above the skill of the majority of the population that might be tempted at using generative text. I'm thinking of students trying to "write" a paper, or any of the myriad of other things people are blissfully unaware of how genAI works that are using it every day. For those people, that just use the default prompt to blindly copy/paste away. For techy nerd types running from CLI, yeah, they could simply use a different model.
- gizmo686 1mo agoDon't underestimate the whisper network of children. It only takes one to realize that Claude gets caught every time, but super paper writer.example.com flies under the teacher's radar. With a strong enough regulatory framework, we probably could suppress unlisenced providers and non-watermarking local harnesses to the point where bypassing them would take some technical know-how. However, I do not think there is anywhere near the political will for such a regime.
- dylan604 1mo agoagain, that's a far cry from each of those kids installing a model to run under cli. you're describing someone else creating a simple UI to use instead of the other models
- datadrivenangel 1mo agoDon't underestimate kids trying to pull one over the adults.
- daveidol 1mo agoYeah if kids are sufficiently motivated all it takes is one vial YouTube tutorial.
- blharr 1mo agoSure but with how many people who use AI without disclosing that they are... and the profit incentive it'd only need one person to make a chat focused on non-watermarking that makes it trivial. Im pretty sure said services already exist, making it so your writing doesnt sound or look like AI... but the real problem is surprisingly that we don't even care if the output is AI
- agrberg 28d agoI imagine at least one enterprising kid figuring out to ask Claude "I have a macOS/Windows computer, walk me through the steps to install and run an open source AI"