> during the months of autumn [...] Work is left to feebler hands. ... In those months the great oracle becomes —what at other times it is not—simply silly. In spring and early summer, the Times is often violent, unfair, fallacious, inconsistent, intentionally unmeaning, even positively blundering, but it is very seldom merely silly. ... In the dead of autumn, when the second and third rate hands are on, we sink from nonsense written with a purpose to nonsense written because the writer must write either nonsense or nothing.
Sounds like "The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art" where this came from was a wonderful little venture. Is there anything like it today?
Feels like "we sink from nonsense written with a purpose to nonsense written because the writer must write either nonsense or nothing" accurately describes HN sometimes :D
"And it doesn't stop there. There's the power question."
So not only is the Reddit user in question writing impassioned angry screeds about being caught using AI in their work, but they are presumably asking for Claude's help in writing said prose. I wonder what that prompt looked like?
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/1vlzjc8/about_t...
The whole text was a smorgasbord of the worst, most boring AI clichés possible. It was hard to finish for me, even though it is not that long, just because it was so badly written.
The only reason why I think it was partly written by a person who is just way too used to AI (as opposed to a simple prompt) is that the gaps in its logic feel more human than artificial.
[1]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08025-4 [2]https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8912793-provenance-signa...
Somehow it is acceptable for us to have photo, video or audio watermarked but not text or worse code.
Claude outputs are already very easily distinguishable. The watermark is already pretty much there, even if it's not explicitly put in the outputs.
It is quite counterintuitive, but you can hide texts the same size as the original text in imperceptible statistics of a text.
Compared to that feat, hiding a watermark is very easy.
Well, the solution is quite easy: start thinking on your own again and write the lines yourself.
I welcome this watermarking. Finally it's an easy detectable signal that someone just generated some request/answer to waste my time by forcing me thinking for the other person too. Now that time is over.
(It never was hard to spot this type of texts but now there is evidence)
We are very, very far from that! So far we have a single ai vendor introducing a statistical bias to their generation that can make it simpler to identify genAI in some texts. We don’t know yet how effective that will be in practice, and if other models will follow suit
There should at least be some cut off where it applies and where it doesn't.
Legitimately we should have had this day one for a whole host of reasons (not the least of which is the issue of inadvertently using output from generative AI as training data for Generative AI).
But bigger than that is that while there are folks that want to be able to have a machine do their textual output for them with as little energy on their part as possible, the rest of us have to deal with the impact of that call on their part.
The purpose of communicating with other humans is not utilitarian, psychologically it is the pathway to connection and forms a large basis of how we are able to get along without eradicating ourselves as a species. Using generative AI to replace that humanity seems unthinkable to me, and having markers that help us differentiate serves as a way to keep others from gaslighting us, which undermines trust and communication.
I realize as a stereotype technical folks see communication as a means to a utilitarian end, but it's so much more important than that, so much so that even this small action of watermarking generative AI output can keep untold disasters from occurring because humans didn't know other humans were using it.
It's turned on right now. Can you tell a difference? I can't.
How many ways could I write this paragraph and still convey the same idea? Way more than we're aware of. Hundreds? Thousands? Maybe a lot more? The number of semantically similar variants increases exponentially with each word.
I suspect anthropic could turn their fingerprinting up or down if they want. If it were turned way up, claude would use weird phrasing but it would take very little text to tell if something were AI generated. If they turned it down, it would seem imperceptible to humans, but you would need a large sample to determine (with high accuracy) that a passage was AI generated. There's probably a very large middle ground where humans can't tell, and where it doesn't take a large text sample to know (with high probability) that some text was AI generated.
sylware•57m ago
pizzly•38m ago
d1sxeyes•20m ago
It’s very simple, just change every third word for something different to what you originally wrote.
It’s very straightforward, just change each and every third word for something different instead of what you actually wrote.
And so on ad infinitum.