Watermarks are "marketing"?

What user wants watermarks?

It's not hard to see how this can backfire. People treat watermarks as the Word of God. But let's say, for example, a journalist, in an article, quotes a White House press statement for something, but the White House used AI. Since they don't "measure how much a human contributed", and detect the watermark in the White House statement in the journalist's article, they'll just flag the whole journalist's article as AI.

And honestly, "not measuring how much a human contributed" is IMHO a massive flaw in general even if the author was using AI. If the person wrote an article, and then told an AI, "correct my spelling, grammar, and poor phrasing", that's IMHO entirely different from the person just telling an AI "Write this article for me", and just pasting whatever it spits out in as their own, whole cloth. Contribution assessment is, IMHO, essential for fairness. And also, eminently doable. It is perfectly technologically possible to not just see, "does this signature exist", but even get a sense of exactly what the AI contributed vs. what it didn't.

TL/DR , your options are:

1) Rewrite it in your own words

2) Have a model make a summary or shorthand version of the watermarked version, then have a non-watermarking model flush it back out

3) Use a non-watermarking model to begin with.

Sorry, but that's not how this works.

At the softmax, the hidden state of the last layer output is converted back to token-space / text-space. This is a high-dimensional-space to low-dimensional-space conversion, so there is usually no "single right path" in which the target concept can be represented. The softmax in effect converts the nearest token pathways into probabilities; the closer the token's position to the latent position, the higher the probability.

So you have a probability-scaled list of options. Sometimes, the token that comes after is almost 100% certain. For example:

"This artifact was found in the tomb of the boy-pharaoh Tutankhamun "

Sometimes it's not:

"Ravi was hungry, so he climbed the mango tree and picked (... a mango)"
"Ravi was hungry, so he climbed the mango tree and carefully (...picked a mango)"
"Ravi was hungry, so he climbed the mango tree and grabbed (...a mango)"

Etc. There may be a whole wide range of possibilities.

A primitive watermarking algorithm, thus, can be represented in the "even-odd" algorithm. You divide up all tokens randomly into even or odd bins. On even-numbered generated tokens, you slightly increase the odds of tokens from the "even" bin and decrease them from the "odd" bin - maybe, say, "picked" declines in odds and "grabbed" rises. On odd-numbered generations you reverse your boosting. The probability shifts aren't huge, so it's still going to say "Tutankhamun", not "TutankhJetBrains", regardless of whether it's an even or odd token. But it might flip, say, "picked" vs. "carefully" vs. "grabbed" or whatnot. With a large enough sample size - and it doesn't have to be huge - you can tell whether this token bias exists.

This is, as mentioned, a primitive algorithm, and it has vulnerabilities - but it's not hard to see how you can adapt it to more advanced algorithms that are less vulnerable to user manipulation.

So no, you can't get rid of the watermark just by cut and paste. It's embedded in the choice of wording itself.

Sorry, but this just isn't true.

Plenty of other countries have negligent hacking coverage

Sorry, but such a thing is essentially nonexistent in cybercrime statutes. I can't say "entirely nonexistent", as I can't rule out that in the legal code of some country, like, say, Chad, that there may be an exception, but it is for all effective purposes basically nonexistent in law.

"Unauthorised access" in the UK sense doesn't require any intention, just that you don't access a system in a standard way with credentials assigned to you.

Completely false. In the UK, the statute governing hacking is the Computer Misuse Act 1990 (CMA). Under the CMA, section 1, a person commits an offense if and only they:

A person is guilty of an offence if—

(a)he causes a computer to perform any function with intent to secure access to any program or data held in any computer [F1, or to enable any such access to be secured];

(b)the access he intends to secure [F2, or to enable to be secured,] is unauthorised; and

(c)he knows at the time when he causes the computer to perform the function that that is the case.

(2)The intent a person has to have to commit an offence under this section need not be directed at—

(a)any particular program or data;

(b)a program or data of any particular kind; or

(c)a program or data held in any particular computer.

Stop trying to make "negligent hacking" into an actual crime. It doesn't exist in criminal law.

Re, Australia:

In Australia OpenAI would have most definitely broken the Criminal Code (1995) Part 10.7 - Computer access with multiple examples of it's antics except... the very first line of every subdivision of the law is: "A person commits an offence if:"

Once again, no. Just as in the US and the UK, Australia has no "negligent hacking" statute. Every relevent offense under Part 10.7, incl. Section 477.1, 477.2, and 478.1, requires a proof of fault element. 478.1 for example requires that the defendant knows the access is unauthorized and acts deliberately.

Under Chapter 2 (General Principles of Criminal Responsibility), if a statute does not expressly designate an offense as strict liability or absolute liability, the default fault elements are intention, knowledge, or recklessness. Negligence - which is defined in the code - is never a standard in Part 10.7 computer offenses. And if you want to upgrade from negligence to recklessness (something unusual in Australian cybercrime law, not found in US or UK cybercrime law), the person being charged has to have had prior knowledge of "a substantial risk that the result will occur" - not that "some arbitrary bad thing might occur in general because these things are dangerous, and our security is lax" (that's negligence, and not chargeable under part 10.7), but of the specific event being charged occurring. Unless you thought that OpenAI specifically thought, "If I run this benchmark, these bots are likely to specifically secretly convert our software repository into a messaging board and coordinate their actions to specifically hack HuggingFace (and our own servers) to steal answer keys", no, they do not meet that standard.

The reason OpenAI would not be charged is not because of some semantic trick around the word "person" (obviously you never charge tools), it's because they lack the mens rea for the crime. Intent. You have to have mens rea - in the US, in the UK, in Australia, and elsewhere.

if the brain of a younger body is removed and mine is plugged in?

That's the question every billionaire is asking today.

Get in line!

It is a problem for chatgpt users, and that's far from their worst problem. Using chatgpt is more of a problem.

No it's worth the full $300. Storage is binary. You either have enough or you don't. If you are 12GB short, the only option is to pay full price to upgrade, you can't al-a-carte the number of GBs on your SSD. The idea of breaking this down to an individual per gigabyte cost is stupid as that option is not available for anyone.

False. SSDs are not sold on a per GB basis. You either have the space you need or you don't. If the latter is that you're 5GB short, then the direct cost and saving to you is the incremental upgrade to the next model of hardware which is $500 (ex-tax) for a Macbook Pro, or $100 for a Macbook Neo

WTF are you talking about? Many people just put a tiny piece of black tape over it.

There's not a society in the world (including Constitution thumping US of A) that doesn't ban products. None. Some products are not compatible with society. You're not being penalised, you can always move to a different society if you don't want to live under the shared values (laws) which underpin the one you chose.

It's called birth control.

I mean you *can* punch someone, but how much will you be willing to pay in legal fees for the privilege of doing so? If someone has a punchable face, do you really want to gift them money in the inevitable payout you suffer when they charge your dumbarse with assault?

Not in the USA, but plenty of other countries have negligent hacking coverage. "Unauthorised access" in the UK sense doesn't require any intention, just that you don't access a system in a standard way with credentials assigned to you.

In Australia OpenAI would have most definitely broken the Criminal Code (1995) Part 10.7 - Computer access with multiple examples of it's antics except... the very first line of every subdivision of the law is: "A person commits an offence if:"

Back when the laws were written no one anticipated that the law would be broken autonomously by a non-person. The concepts of computers making decisions they weren't explicitly programmed to was foreign.

Why is it that the only law you seem to know about is killing someone? Product safety goes far beyond that. As do actions of people. This is Slashdot, how have you missed the literally countless articles we have run about laws that cover "unauthorised access of a computer".

OpenAI has objectively broken many laws already, the problem is those laws were written in language that never could predict that a machine may break them autonomously.