★ Follow-Up Thoughts on Watermarking Schemes for AI-Generated Text

Some follow-up to this weekend’s stemwinder “ Anthropic’s ‘Watermark’ Text Adulteration in Claude Is a Perversion of Writing ”: Temperature Contra a bunch of idiots at Hacker News and elsewhere, I understand that popular LLMs do not just pick the “best” token (word) at each decision point. Counterintuitively, always selecting the highest-probability option produces undesirable results. So the models apply some randomization, and “temperature” is the term for the weighting that’s applied so that