Regretfully, Captain Obvious

John Gruber, yesterday: The best writing I see come out of these models is worse than anything I would choose to read for pleasure. And now Anthropic is saying they’re going to make it worse, on purpose, for purposes that do not benefit me in any way? Even if only slightly worse? Get fucked. … To summarize: We use a method of watermarking that does not have any practical impact on the quality or content of Claude’s outputs; The difference between watermarked and un-watermarked text will not be distinguishable to readers; Translation: Specific words do not matter and we don’t think anyone reads anything closely. I am shocked—shocked!—to hear that one of the leading companies in an industry with so much care for craft that they invented slop doesn’t care about specific words or believe that anyone reads anything closely. ★