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This is such a waste of time. If someone wants to bypass this it will be rather simple. Just change the words. If someone wants to avoid fingerprinting they will. Can’t we just focus on building rather than spending brainpower on these ridiculous sidequests


There's lots of regulations that are easy to bypass. It's absolutely trivial to, say, pull 30 amps from a home circuit rated for only 15 amps. But most people will just trip the fuse because they don't know what they're doing, and the existence of the regulation makes it easy to prove ill intent for anyone who does know what they're doing but causes harm anyway.


>There's lots of regulations that are easy to bypass.

Considering kids already use word substitution and other techniques to avoid plagiarism detectors, is creating a new kind of plagiarism detector weak to word substitution a valid path forward?

Actually, if anything it's just going to compound the false positive rate, making things worse for people who arent cheating.


Of course, the implication by comparison to the building code example, that text absent some homeopathic suggestion of provenance causes harm, is absurd at best.

Sent from my iPhone (harm prevention watermark)


The way I interpret your comment is that, in the future, it will be enough to prove that someone tried to remove an LLM watermark to put them in jail.


Imagine that somebody sold you text that they mislead you to think is not generated by AI and then trying to convince court that they didn't mislead you intentionally. If they've removed the watermark it stops this kind of defense.


That's already on the books... misrepresentation of the product sold... or does the EU doesn't have that?


Generally doing something intentionally or unintentionally might have different penalties.


Why not have our devices generate watermarks for everything? That way, we won’t have any kind of defence.


That's what is going on with images taken. iPhone and other cameras now have a per device cryptographic signature. https://c2pa.org/

Soon images taken without this signature will be unpresentable to the court.


These are corporate regulations, it's not really about putting individuals in jail. I do expect that there could be companies where trying to remove an LLM watermark is a fireable offense, especially in the EU where many kinds of decisions must be made by an accountable human being and may not be delegated to an AI system.


If someone causes financial loss by posting LLM text and is then found to have removed a watermark. Everything in civil law is implicitly inside a if(someone harmed && they sue you) {} block.


I think some EU regulations have merit and some don't, but going "can't we just focus on building instead of spending brainpower on following the law" is not going to win you much affection. There might be a connection between this pervasive attitude in tech and why now every proposed datacenter construction project is being met with ferocious public opposition.


This isn’t just a “techbro” attitude. Although they disagree on the specific problem laws in question, basically every political group (at least in the US) takes issue with the law as written. And most agree (72% as polled in 2023) that the law is written to favor the interests of the wealthy. The pushback against data centers isn’t in contrast to this—data centers provide the bulk of their benefits to wealthy investors, and many localities are permitting them against the will of local citizens.

You might also want to consider that many believe the current AI regulation push is a trojan horse for regulatory capture and subsequent domination of the industry by large, well-connected players who are hostile to privacy and individual freedom.

So when you see US people on a US site complaining about a law that affects US industry, especially scrappy startups, consider if maybe there’s more to it.


> And most agree (72% as polled in 2023) that the law is written to favor the interests of the wealthy.

But this situation is wealthy acting like victims, because laws are not favoring them enough. And then completely ignoring it again and again with "who cares we are superior, we dont have to".


Focus on building what? A future in which only big companies get credit for their work?


Isn't that what this watermarking allows for? To allow LLM companies to detect that certain text was authored by their tools?


Good code is the specification.


For fun?


I have 10 years experience of MCP


Wait, are these considered products? I think the whole indie hacker scene has totally lost it. A product takes time. ”Painkillerideas.com” doesn’t sounds like a product - and this was his biggest win


If you look directly under that you will see that replyguy was his biggest win at a 6 figure sale.


This made me feel very old. Too me it’s 100% logical and not a mystery - while I fully understand that it’s super-weird for people born after 1990


Ha, agreed. I was training a new help desk employee a couple years ago (22 years old) and dated the shit out of myself explaining why I don't like spaces or special characters in file names and directories and why we want to try to keep them as short as possible.


Back in the day that would mark you as a DOS pleb rather than a member of the glorious Macintosh master race.


I thoroughly enjoyed the early days of my career/learning as a DOS pleb!


So did I, but Macintosh people looked at it from an angle of "Why would you not put spaces in file names? They're meant to be human readable, and you will click on files more than you will type them in anyway." They were right, in the end. The future was less evenly distributed in the 80s.


dark days


I still instruct employees to never use spaces or weird characters in filename because they are a pain when I run into them in a CLI.

I don't foresee that advice ever changing lol


Sorry, 100% expected, sure, 100% normal, fine, 100% unremarkable, ok, but 100% logical?


I really didn’t agree with the author on this book. I however liked his other books


I think you are right and that the financial model is a total blind spot to the lawmakers. Never mind the fact that Volvo (or any other be maker) makes the bulk of its money from new car sales. Volvo used to make a lot of money from spares and repairs but that company was divested many many years ago. Now all the money is coming from new vehicle sales.


This article feels like it’s written by someone who wants the boom to be over. Just spending a few hours with AutoGPT made me realize it’s very far dram over. It just started.


This is just virtue signaling and the IETF shouldn’t play along with some company’s business needs… sad to see.


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