Thoughts on Gruber's criticisms

Tech commentator John Gruber published a follow-up post defending his criticism of Anthropic's text watermarking feature in Claude, arguing that it is not a net good for LLMs to produce worse prose. The original post and reply drew attention for what critics describe as a misunderstanding of how LLMs work, with the follow-up accused of adding arrogance to that ignorance. The dispute centers on whether Anthropic's watermarking function, which injects non-random noise into the random noise generator, degrades output quality.

Yesterday John Gruber posted a take https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/anthropics watermark text adulteration in claude is a perversion of writing on Anthropic's text watermarking feature that attracted a lot of attention by making it clear he doesn't understand how LLMs work. Today he posted a reply https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/follow-up thoughts on watermarking to all that feedback, adding more arrogance to his ignorance. "I must disagree that it can possibly be seen as a net good for LLMs to produce worse prose." he says. Complaining that the function that randomizes your output is not objectively perfect because it's injecting some non-random noise into the random noise generator is a strange position to take. His views on writing and writers in response to Dan Moren https://sixcolors.com/post/2026/08/llms-arent-writing/ are even more uninformed, but this is probably not the place to unpack post-modern literary theory. But trying to understand the automatic sentence machine with a normative Modernist worldview is like bringing a philosophy degree to a knife fight. Pointless in more than one way. And while I have no ethical problem with machine generated text in general aside from the obvious burning the planet down bit , the point of writing, for me at least, is only partially the output. Writing is a process that forces clarity onto the thoughts of the writer. Perhaps John should do some actual writing on this topic and see if that helps him understand it a bit better.