New ChatGPT Models Seem to Leave Watermarks on Text

https://www.rumidocs.com/newsroom/new-chatgpt-models-seem-to-leave-watermarks-on-text

by hosein88 • 1 year ago

19 28 1 year ago

Magma74042• 1 year ago

I don't have a ChatGPT account and I can't reproduce it without being logged in. They should say whether it requires an account or not, because it's not very conclusive for me.

ungreased0675• 1 year ago

Why were you expecting to use ChatGPT without an account?

relaxing• 1 year ago

Because you can use chatgpt without an account.

Magma74042• 1 year ago

Because it's possible and because all the proxies who give you a free access to those models don't have those so-called watermarks, which makes me suspicious about this story.

And why the fuck was I downvoted to hell for asking a simple question and giving my opinion about the whole thing? Am I on reddit or what?

mhatma• 1 year ago

Looks to me like these "watermarks" are embedded in monetary numbers, acronyms etc. Maybe to stop them breaking into different lines?

niel• 1 year ago

This is the most likely explanation.

I mean, sure, these characters could be used to help estimate the likelihood text was generated (because human writers might be less likely to add proper non-breaking spaces), but I doubt these are watermarks.

rep_lodsb3• 1 year ago

Yeah, it's probably not an intentional watermark, just something the model has been trained to do. Maybe some professionally written news articles already use them for the same purpose?

Still hope HN adds a filter to block any comment with those characters in it :)

johnisgood2• 1 year ago

It is very easy to filter those out from the output of GPT, though, using basic UNIX utilities. In fact, many methods don't survive reformatting or copy-pasting, not requiring filtering at all.

It is a very basic watermark technique (text steganography) if it indeed is supposed to be one.

A more advanced one would be a linguistic (grammar-based) one, but I am not going to give any more ideas. :D

crooked-v• 1 year ago

U+202F in the screenshot, between "FY" and "2024", is the "Narrow No-Break Space ". Similarly, U+A0 is the "No-Break Space" (aka  ).

It's not watermarks, it's just scraped typography.

helsinkiandrew• 1 year ago

The examples they give all look like valid uses of different Non-breaking spaces, with width hints for their use/location, this might be a little overzealous if written by a human but perhaps not for a machine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-breaking_space

Different display apps may "display them identically" but others and typesetters/printing apps might not.

mgraczyk2• 1 year ago

As others mention, these do not look like watermarks, it looks like it's just emitting exotic whitespace in certain cases.

bjt12345• 1 year ago

Exotic whitespaces that destroy a programmer's free time.

rep_lodsb3• 1 year ago

Probably won't show up in source code at all, though nothing of value would be lost if they did!

cluckindan2• 1 year ago

You mean typographically correct whitespace

mgraczyk2• 1 year ago

But should probably be removed when copying, especially code

neel8986• 1 year ago

Ideally this watermarks are much more subtle. For example they put watermark through different distribution of word sequence which are difficult to remove or identify

antirez• 1 year ago

Students cheating with LLMs show more a weakness of a system than anything else. Rich folks had other people make assignment for them for ages, now this got democratized. The educational institutions are mostly disinterested in really doing what they should do to teach critical thinking and understanding if students really understood. To check the home made assignments is a small part of that (in theory). It's not LLMs, is terrible schools.

otabdeveloper4• 1 year ago

Teachers can spot LLM-generated homework from a mile away. (Well, unless the homework assignment itself comes from a stock or autogenerated source.)

vasco• 1 year ago

They can when they can. Sometimes they just won't like a kid or be tired or just wrong and falsely accuse them. There's been plenty already. I had a kid in my class during some years that would brag to other kids that his mom wrote all his longer, non-math homeworks. You're only putting yourself back by cheating, when time comes for proper exams for university placement you won't have it available and you won't take anyone else's place. Most places nowadays won't even fail kids from passing to the next grade, so it doesn't even matter.

trescenzi• 1 year ago

I studied CS and Philosophy in college. The philosophy department at the time was struggling to get people to declare so they started a campaign with the slogan “Thinking of a major? Major in thinking”. Which I’ve always thought was both clever and accurate. Such departments become more valuable as the harder skills are more automatable. I doubt that will translate into more philosophy majors but one can dream.

TekMol• 1 year ago

This looks like an attempt at content marketing, rather than a valid blog post.

A shocking title which brought this to the HN frontpage, but then it does not hold. The characters all look legit in the position they are used.

derelicta• 1 year ago

Oof. Time to share this with the rest of my classmates lmao

adt• 1 year ago

Nah, this is bs.

Google do it with Gemini tho:

https://lifearchitect.ai/watermarking/

code-less• 1 year ago

you can use this tool to remove watermarks: https://gptwatermark.com

New ChatGPT Models Seem to Leave Watermarks on Text

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