The year is 2027. A beginner programmer searches how to access the last array element in a programming language she is unfamiliar with. The results come in. “Top 10 array accesses that will make you want to buy our sponsors product”. She sighs and asks Claude instead. She pastes the one-liner into her code. Finishes the remaining code. Tests. Double-check. Commit. Push. A notification appears. “Your account has been temporarily suspended for violating GitHub’s terms of service”. Forgot to mark claude as a co-author. She sighs again
These watermarks require the text to be long-ish and not too edited from the original. I didn’t see this explained in the article, but I only skimmed it. The press release from Anthropic goes into it, without giving many details.
I’m guessing it’s going to embed a pattern with punctuation and word/letter choices, so there will need to be a sufficient amount of text to ensure its actually the watermark and not just dumb luck.
Yeah it’s exactly a pattern with token choices, by introducing a statistical bias to the randomness in token generation. Quality isn’t affected because the model is still choosing from the best candidates for the next token. You’re right that to be effective they need a long enough input to get enough matches to be.
Computer code is also going to be less effective because code has a much more rigid structure dictated by language syntax rules, coding conventions, linters and formatters, etc.
The year is 2027. A beginner programmer searches how to access the last array element in a programming language she is unfamiliar with. The results come in. “Top 10 array accesses that will make you want to buy our sponsors product”. She sighs and asks Claude instead. She pastes the one-liner into her code. Finishes the remaining code. Tests. Double-check. Commit. Push. A notification appears. “Your account has been temporarily suspended for violating GitHub’s terms of service”. Forgot to mark claude as a co-author. She sighs again
Or the ToS violation will be that she didn’t use Copilot (which will probably have a different name in 2027)
Microsoft Windows X-360+5
Microsoft AI Explorer One
ClippAI
It’s that the one better or worse than the Explorer One S?
These watermarks require the text to be long-ish and not too edited from the original. I didn’t see this explained in the article, but I only skimmed it. The press release from Anthropic goes into it, without giving many details.
I’m guessing it’s going to embed a pattern with punctuation and word/letter choices, so there will need to be a sufficient amount of text to ensure its actually the watermark and not just dumb luck.
Yeah it’s exactly a pattern with token choices, by introducing a statistical bias to the randomness in token generation. Quality isn’t affected because the model is still choosing from the best candidates for the next token. You’re right that to be effective they need a long enough input to get enough matches to be.
Computer code is also going to be less effective because code has a much more rigid structure dictated by language syntax rules, coding conventions, linters and formatters, etc.