BuzzMachine

On this week’s Intelligent Machines, we cohosts had a spirited disagreement about Anthropic’s watermarking of text, as required by EU regulation. The company just released more detail about how it will work, and now I’m upset for a different reason than I first thought.

I’m angry as a writer.

Anthropic’s method will alter its models’ word choices in a pattern based on a key only it knows, allowing it to detect writing (or editing or translation) by its machine — to an uncertain degree of certainty. The company contends there is no difference in meaning between the otherwise random choices “grey” or “overcast” in, for example, the context of weather. So what’s the issue?

Thus Anthropic declares words fungible, language random, choice meaningless. Not to me. I try to select my words as carefully as I can for a number of considerations: style, tone, rhythm, avoiding repetition, but most of all meaning. You may quibble with my choices, but they are mine, not yours; that’s what makes my writing mine, to communicate what I wish to communicate. “Gray” and “overcast” are not the same, damnit. That’s the reason we have both of them.

So I resent Anthropic et al dismissing the value of a writer’s selection of one word over another for the impact that decision has on expression, on impression — occasionally on art.

We humans might not be able to detect whether the machine or the key is being used. That’s not the point. The selections/changes/alterations made in accordance with the key will affect sense and style on an ever-larger proportion of text entering discourse, and the fact that Anthropic (and the EU) consider this acceptable, unimportant, even trivial has cultural impact on the worth of words. They devalue writing. At the very moment when LLMs commodify writing and writers, this is just another kick to the kidneys for a challenged craft.

And why is this forensic breadcrumb trail being required? Because of prejudice against the technology: fear unto moral panic. But technological solutions to perceived technological problems have just as many unintended consequences as the problems themselves, often more. The irony is that in a zealous effort to protect the distinctiveness — the sanctity — of human text, the authorities and the technologists deprecate what makes text human.

In my new book Hot Type, I quote critics such as Friedrich Kittler insisting that typewriters changed how Nietzsche, Hemingway, or Hesse wrote and thought. At the end my book, in what I call a typographical autobiography, I recount how technologies, from typewriter to computer to PostScript, affected my composition and cognition. These technologies affected my methods, but that makes my prose no less human. We should debate what the impact of this next technology, AI, might be on creativity and perception, but we should give that process time. Rushing to regulatory and technological solutions to a problem not yet fully understood is foolish.

So I’m pissed.

Here is a sentence from the first page of Hot Type, one I chipped away at innumerable times. These are the choices I made:

Unlike what we now call machines — computer chips veiled inside sleek and sealed grey boxes with no moving parts, save fans to cool their brains— the Linotype’s innards were left exposed, as if to show off the genius of its works: its troop of idiosyncratically shaped cams, gears, belts, arms, and wheels marching to instructions foreseen more than a century before by their inventor, German-born watchmaker Ottmar Mergenthaler.

Now let us recast it with perfectly acceptable synonyms, as Anthropic’s detection key might, in composition, editing, or translation. In fact, I asked Claude to do just that. Here is what it delivered as “a synonym-substituted version, keeping the structure and meaning intact.”

Contrary to what we presently term machines — microprocessors concealed within polished and enclosed grey containers with no moving components, except fans to cool their circuitry — the Linotype’s mechanisms were left visible, as if to display the ingenuity of its craftsmanship: its brigade of distinctively shaped cams, gears, belts, arms, and wheels progressing to directives anticipated more than a century earlier by their creator, German-born horologist Ottmar Mergenthaler.

You may find Claude’s just fine. I find that it misses the wonder, cadence, and anachronism I tried to convey. Anthropic’s engineers and the EU’s regulators may ask, what’s the prob? Much, I say.