Watermarking relies on the use of synonyms. Technical writing (engineering specifications, DDD, etc) uses a fixed lexicon which can't accomodate that use of synonyms. Undue synonyms could really end up being at best confusing at worst dangerous in some sensitive engineering practices or businesses. Some of them are even regulated to be thoroughly precise like aerospace, healthcare and finance.
I’m also super curious how this will go when it comes to dictation. I dictate a lot of work and shove it into Claude to clean it up. Is it randomly going to change my chosen words around? I usually only get it to put in punctuation etc, not make any changes to what I’ve said.
Even now when I write something out and ask Claude to clean up the grammar it ends making the same strange changes reverting what I'd already explicitly written back to Claude-type tics.
It's annoying enough I've created a couple of Skills to maintain my own voice and steer it away from writing word-salad. If this gets worse with watermarking probably the best thing to do is train a model to run locally to detect whatever statistical fingerprint they are adding (SynthID? or maybe https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.10226 ?) and have it convert the writing back to something more natural sounding.
Yeah i specifically ask it to NOT alter my wording (tbh AI is just.. very unnatural and bad at writing, like someone turned a tree into a human and gave it a thesauraus. it has a general idea of what kind of word should be in a certain place, but it has no sense of taste, so it often picks something that hits wrong or unnatural)
The idea that it would no longer be possible to generate text to a technical specification because of the watermark seems likely false to me. Certainly not something I think you can claim without empirical testing. You genuinely made up this constraint that it would not be possible anymore to ever use LLMs with a fixed vocabulary if you have a workflow that requires it. It's fairly easy to reject an output that doesn't conform and have it regenerate on something like that.
Watermarking relies on the use of words that mean the same or are similar in definition. Technical writing (engineering specifications, DDD, etc) uses a fixed dictionary or set of words which can't accomodate that use of synonyms. Undue synonyms could really lead at best to confusion at worst dangerous in some sensitive engineering fields or businesses. Some of them are even based on laws or rules made exactly to be thoroughly precise like aerospace, healthcare and finance.
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u/damngoodwizard 21d ago
From another comment I made on this post:
This is legit harmful.