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Alex Hern
@hern.bsky.social

If you use Claude right now, then it doesn’t pick the “best” word for a sentence. It creates a distribution of possible words, assesses the probability of any given word fitting the slot, and randomly picks between them based on that probability.

John Gruber
@gruber.foo

I addressed this in a follow-up post yesterday. The per-token randomness in existing models is entirely in the interest of generating semantically better output. The fingerprinting scheme are not to improve output but to embed a signal in the output: daringfireball.net/2026/08/follow…

daringfireball.netFollow-Up Thoughts on Watermarking Schemes for AI-Generated TextI want the answers that I read to be cogent, lucid, accurate, blessedly terse — and ideally to strike a consistent tone that is pleasant to my reading ear. The genie is not going back in the bottle.
Alex Hern
@hern.bsky.social

Thanks John. It’s a good follow up, and clear we now just disagree on the principle. For me: When a system produces a different answer every time you pull the trigger, I don’t see a big problem with constraining it to a subset of the answers it would already have produced

John Gruber
@gruber.foo

But the choices aren't from unranked lists. They're from ranked lists, and the only way to leave a signal strong enough to detect is to promote lower-ranked choices. The more subtle the promotion of lower-ranked choices, the weaker the fingerprint. Stronger signal necessarily means worse choices.

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