Technology

In other news, mathematicians have been working hard on calculator detector software. Upon request for comment, leading mathematicians suggested a variety of ideas, such as such as secretly embedding a watermark “58008” (BOOBS) into the decimal parts of pi and e to more easily identify derived calculations. There was consistent sentiment among leading minds that “back in my day we had to work hard to do math, and walk up hill both ways in the snow to school”… and that “there’s nothing wrong with a good ol’ fashion abbicus, dag nabbit!”

This has been known in the ML space forever. LLMs don't actually output words/tokens, but probabilities for a long list of tokens, and the sampler picks one (usually the mostl likely token). And if you arbitrarily weigh these probabilities (eg 50% of possible token outputs are more likely than the other 50%, as a random example), it creates a "signature" in any text thats easy to measure. The sampler randomizes it a tiny bit, but that averages out in long texts.

It's defeatable. I'm sure if you maken enough OpenAI queries, you can find the bias. I think a paper already tackled this. But this likely will stop the lazy absures, aka 99% of abusers, who should just use some other LLM if they really care.

Another open secret in LLM land is that OpenAI is actually falling behind open research efforts, hence its hilarious it took them this long to implement something so simple.

That's cool, but literally any other implementation won't have that, or will have an incompatible watermark.

Is “The Algorithm” just “we stuffed all our GPT responses into a Lucene index and look for 80% matches”?

Because that’s what I’d do.

It's probably some type of cypher. Which will take people exactly one (1) afternoon to crack.

no. i bet it uses an algorithm setting optional words to specific variants over a given set of text.

but it sounds to me like they are figuring out how to monetize the cure for their disease

The arstechnica article speculated it was more of a pattern of words thing.

I think it is lies, and doesn't exist or work anywhere near as good as they claim. Or, its incredibly easy to bypass.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/08/openai-has-the-tech-to-watermark-chatgpt-text-it-just-wont-release-it/