Summary

Gruber responds to critics of his earlier anti-watermarking essay by clarifying his understanding of LLM temperature, then sharpening his core objections. He argues watermarking schemes apply randomness for a purpose other than quality improvement, likely degrading output even slightly. Even granting watermarking doesn't hurt quality, he finds the schemes objectionable because they operate secretly and serve only the providers who hold the detection keys. He dismisses the practical utility of watermarking entirely, arguing anyone motivated to evade detection will simply use non-watermarking LLMs or paraphrasing tools. He closes with a philosophical tangent on whether LLMs 'write,' a meditation on English's dual Germanic-Latin vocabulary, and the question of whether that richness makes English prose more fingerprintable.

Key Insight

Secret AI watermarking schemes are both practically useless — anyone motivated to evade them will — and ethically objectionable because they operate on users without consent and serve only the providers who hold the detection keys.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 4

  I hold that good prose is much more like programming code. Exactness in word choice, phrasing, tone, and even punctuation is always better than imprecision.

• 6

  A useful watermark would be one that anyone can check. These SynthID 'watermarks' are entirely dependent upon secrets held by the LLM providers.

• 7

  The people in favor of this watermarking for text have been sold a pipe dream, a fantasy.

• 8

  I find it funny that so many people who claim to believe that LLMs only produce 'slop' and never anything useful also seem 100 percent convinced that the same LLMs are capable of watermarking their output in reliable ways.

• 5

  My advice is not to care whether anything was written by an AI or a human. The only thing worth evaluating is what we human readers are naturally good at determining: whether it is good or bad.

• 9

  If it smells like crap it's crap, whether the turds came out of a human anus or a turd-generating robot.

• 6

  I say if you can read something, it was necessarily written.

Tone

critical, philosophical, combative