8 ms·
> "The exact words we choose when writing matter." Then write your own damn text if you care about the exact wording so much
by voidUpdate 1mo ago
> "The exact words we choose when writing matter."
Then write your own damn text if you care about the exact wording so much
- allisdust 1mo agoLLMs are no more than pen and paper at this point. Especially for those who aren't trying to create slop. We all would want our pens to accurately reflect the strokes (well in this case thoughts) rather than adding tiny watermarks to identify that it is generated by a particular pen or a user. Watermarking per model is just the start. The method is cheap enough to distinguish individual users.
- voidUpdate 1mo agoLLMs do a whole lot more than writing your thoughts down. They write extra text. If you just want a pen and paper, use Notepad. Or better, a pen and paper
- Arodex 1mo ago>LLMs are no more than pen and paper at this point. Then use pen and paper. It is the same, you say, right?
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- ehnto 1mo agoThat is an insane statement, LLMs generate swaths of text from almost nothing. If they are adding so little value as to be as transparent as a pen and paper then why use one at all? Transcription doesn't need an LLM so that's not what you're taking about I assume.
- a2ff6eeb0 1mo agoWhat? The entire reason I use an LLM is to be able to avoid thinking about a topic. That's their whole damn value prop: outsourcing thinking and producing without understanding. I don't need to read emails in detail to respond any more.
- kgarten 1mo agoOne could also use butterflies to write ;) https://xkcd.com/378/ https://xkcd.com/378/ The problem is, that LLMs worked very well for me to improve my writing. Especially as I'm not a native speaker, it was a great way to improve the legibility of my work. I want a tool that helps me improve my writing. A tool I can learn from. Not a tool that switches out "bananas" to "airplanes." I'm was using Claude Opus and now Fabel extensively for editing my texts and I find the recent updates abysmal. Not sure if it's due to the Text Watermark. Before Claude was great in sharpening the meaning in my writing, it's now close to unusable.
- voidUpdate 1mo agoI'll be interested to see if people can actually pick out which text is watermarked and which isn't once they introduce it. It won't switch "bananas" to "airplanes". It'll switch "I really enjoy eating bananas" to "I love eating bananas" or similar
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- soVeryTired 1mo agoTo that point, given a corpus of writing from person A and another from person B, I have no doubt it’s easy to train a classifier to determine who wrote what. In fact I believe law enforcement agencies already have these classifiers. The only difference here is that Anthropic is actively trying to make the watermark undetectable.
- voidUpdate 1mo agoThey're not trying to make the watermark undetectable, that would defeat the point of a watermark. They're making it detectable, but not make the text obviously watermarked
- soVeryTired 1mo agoUndetectable by a human reader. Come on, give the post a charitable reading.
- shubhamjain 1mo agoWhat an absurd take on a very reasonable concern. As much as I hate “obviously AI” writing, I don’t understand why we have to handicap the tech and prevent it from improving. This manipulation of word choices virtually guarantees AI will always sound like a robot.
- moooo99 1mo agoWith all things going on among AI bros and the AI industry as a whole, are you really that surprised there is a widespread aversion against the tech?
- voidUpdate 1mo agoHave you compared pre- and post-watermarked text to make that assertion? And I'm not sure how writing your own text if you care deeply about the word choice is handicapping the technology?
- croon 1mo agoI don't think there's been a single version of the major LLM providers that haven't handicapped the tech since the beginning by changing temperature/top-P/frequency penalty/etc. All of those stray from "highest probability" token selection. What's funny is it was done specifically to make it sound less like a robot/deterministic.
- ruszki 1mo agoReasonable? A concern which is based on no real data?
- guenthert 1mo ago> This manipulation of word choices virtually guarantees AI will always sound like a robot. You make it sound as if that were a bad thing.
- mrguyorama 1mo agoThe entire watermarking scheme is based on replacing a random number generator with a seeded random number generator. This cannot change the "voice" of the LLM. It was already letting a random number generator choose which adjectives to use. Now that random number generator encodes a tiny signal. But fundamentally the way it writes has not changed. It's not making it choose different words. It's a minor change to how it chooses between multiple nearly identical words, where in the current case it literally flips a coin.
- KaiserPro 1mo agoI mean this is the thing that really comes off hard. If you want precision and clarity of your writing, then you need to hand write it. Just like when you are optimising, its common to drop to a lower level language because the compiler doesn't express what you want. Sure its hard, but you know, thats kinda the point. Even if you don't want that, the LLM is an average of the style it was trained to give out. Which is a homogenisation of the language to create a vague padding medium between a few generalised facts. (because a. it makes it less jarring when stuff is wrong, because its smeared over a higher amount of text and b. it looks more 'professional' because American business English is all guff and no meat) Also yes, two isolated phrases may have subtly different meaning, frankly, the nuance is missed on most people. If you look at the interactions on here, at least 25% of the arguments are caused by people angrily reacting to the things _they_ thought the other person was saying, rather than what the actual person was saying. So no its not a perversion, the LLM is, if you're gonna be picky about things.
- throwthrowuknow 1mo agoThe bigger problem is its effect on the way we use language. The amount of LLM generated or edited media is going to keep increasing and the media that people consume affects their own word choice.
- KaiserPro 1mo ago> affects their own word choice. exactly. in the same way that printed books affected word choice, so did the radio.
- Y-bar 1mo agoI can't remember any radio determining words or adjusting grammar of the person speaking through it. Neither can I recall there has ever been a moveable type press, laser printer, or inkjet which bastardised the words of authors. These were mediums _through_ which communication happened. Language models, large or small, are not any such medium.
- AshleysBrain 1mo agoIf the exact words we choose when writing matter so much, then why use a non-deterministic LLM that produces slightly different output on every run?
- recursive-call 1mo agoThe exact words matter to people who people who don’t use it to write for them. A lot of people use Claude as a friend/therapist/romantic partner/etc. That’s who I imagine would be most affected
- nemo 1mo ago>A lot of people use Claude as a friend/therapist/romantic partner People developing a para-social (pseudo-social?) relationship with a corporate robot have far bigger problems than the word-chooser in their robot "friend".
- summarybot 1mo agoVery intelligent people need intelligent-others to bounce ideas off of, and the LLM can be that.
- Helloworldboy 1mo ago[dead]
- kergonath 1mo agoVery intelligent people should be able to grasp that a LLM is not intelligent.
- sailfast 1mo agoHave you tried to "rubber duck" an idea with an LLM. The latest models are pretty damnably good at it.
- kergonath 1mo agoI have, and I still do this occasionally. I don’t believe the plant on my desk (I don’t have a rubber duck) is intelligent. I don’t need it to be intelligent, either. I also do it with a LLM every now and then and, while it’s feedback is more useful than a toy’s, it does not need to be intelligent either.
- mangoman 1mo agoWhat are you talking about? I understand OP has the perspective of writers, but let’s say you’re asking an LLM to explain a concept and it uses green words that are actually more difficult to understand. Or you ask for an analogy to explain a topic and the analogy doesn’t quite land because the description used “gray” instead of “overcast”.
- eloisant 1mo agoWatermarking or not, LLM are already using RNG to pick a variant between different words/expressions.
- eloisant 1mo agoAdditionally, LLM are already rolling the dice on different wordings so I don't see how this watermarking makes it any less precise.
- doginasuit 1mo agoDo people not realize this will apply to ALL Claude output, not just writing you ask it to produce? > Marks will apply to output from supported Claude models across Claude Platform (API), Claude, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, and Claude Tag, and wherever Claude is offered. I've never asked an LLM to generate writing I wish to post as my own. I don't understand why we think it is a good idea to fudge all output just so people can't cheat on their homework or generate slop. It won't have any impact on those things because there will always be models that don't do this. All it will do is increase the rate of false negatives. It is deeply misguided regulation and Anthropic should have just said no on grounds of common sense.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- deng 1mo agoI'm sure he honestly appreciates the pushback.
- kergonath 1mo agoI am sure he is quite happy to have people disagree with him on HN. He usually wears it as a badge of pride. We might even have a follow-up in a couple of days about how these techy weirdos lost the plot.
- SilasX 1mo agoOpenAI released a feature that lets you tweak ChatGPT output to sound more human and like yourself and correct inaccuracies: http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2026/04/open-ai-strikes-back-chatgpts-new.html http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2026/04/open-ai-strikes-ba...
- apparent 1mo agoHis complaint seems to center on conversations between him and the LLM, not copy being written for publication elsewhere. That is, if Claude is going to teach him a new skill, he wants it to pick the most accurate words possible, not "pretty accurate words, subject to watermarking techniques".
- pchristensen 1mo agoHe's a professional writer. As the article says, even if you write your own words, this is still a problem with proofreading, copy-pasting references or quotes, and "AI checkers".
- Timwi 29d agoIs the concern that the AI will rephrase the text during proofreading, thus falsifying a copy-pasted quote? I'm not sure how such a change could go unnoticed, unless you blindly publish the AI output without looking at it, which doesn't sound like something someone would do who wants to “write their own words”.
- queenkjuul 25d agoI still don't get why a professional writer would ever accept an AI proofreader over a real one, or a "quote" returned from an LLM over one sourced from a reputable reference.
- firemelt 1mo agowhy you act so tough bro?
- Arubis 1mo agoYou are responding to the original article, authored by John Gruber, who, last I checked, has been writing his own damn text multiple times every damn day for multiple decades as a primary vocation. I’m willing to venture that Gruber is on the list of folks that get to hold the opinion choice of words matters.
- queenkjuul 25d agoHolding that opinion is fine; holding that opinion while using LLMs to probabilistically choose words for you doesn't add up. You want carefully chosen words? Read a book, or write your own. An LLM is not carefully choosing anything, it's providing words based on probabilities.