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US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers

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Re: US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers

#41

Post by sn41 »

lwneal wrote: post #17

The best protection against this type of de-anonymization is to take measures now, while you still have time, to prevent it. It is possible to change the style of one's writing by using a language model which alters the original text in order to create a new piece with a different style. For example, to translate your text into the grandiose and flowing diction of a bygone era, you might consider the project below. […

I find the examples given in the README to be quite tame for Victorian English. Compare it with the ending lines of A Tale of Two Cities:

"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.",

or this from Pride and Prejudice:

"However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters."

Re: US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers

#42

Post by egberts1 »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #22
hardnose wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Credit scores are not determined by the government. If a credit ratings agency took that step, it would harm them because Twitter posts are unlikely to represent a meaningful variable when predicting someone's creditworthiness. Don't confuse that with "social credit" systems, whereby China prevents you from riding trains if you say something naughty.

(citation needed - that’s not actually implemented in china at scale, though it’s a convenient talking point in the west)

It is called 社会信用体系 .

Try and keep up.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System

Re: US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers

#43

Post by runjake »

blakesterz wrote: post #28

There's a great book on this kind of thing, Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous, by Don Foster. This was written way back in 2000. People have been doing this for decades.

> People have been doing this for decades.

The key point here is that it's AI-driven and at scale -- in other words, mass surveillance.

Personally, I see this as part of the US IC's mission, despite the potential domestic detriment.

Re: US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers

#44

Post by wahnfrieden »

egberts1 wrote: post #42
wahnfrieden wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(citation needed - that’s not actually implemented in china at scale, though it’s a convenient talking point in the west)

It is called 社会信用体系 . Try and keep up. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System

Try and read.

Where exactly does it say it’s ever progressed beyond trials and announcements ie implemented at scale - oh it doesn’t

Re: US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers

#45

Post by [deleted] »

dehrmann wrote: post #8

Plans? I assumed lots of people were already working on this. There's already a lot of training data out there, and I suspect most users can be identified by use of a handful of uncommon trigrams and sentence stats. I know you can recognize things I've written at work because they have real em dashes—people rarely type with those.

[deleted]

Re: US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers

#46

Post by MichaelCollins »

lwneal wrote: post #17

The best protection against this type of de-anonymization is to take measures now, while you still have time, to prevent it. It is possible to change the style of one's writing by using a language model which alters the original text in order to create a new piece with a different style. For example, to translate your text into the grandiose and flowing diction of a bygone era, you might consider the project below. […

Tools like this probably fool traditional stylometry, but what about de-anonymization tools that find similar ideas, not writing style? Perhaps most people have boring common ideas they got from others, but the sort of people the US Government is most interested in are likely quirkier than most.

Re: US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers

#47

Post by PointA2B »

ElementaryElk wrote: post #40
PointA2B wrote: post #33

Content marketers in the digital marketing space commonly put blog posts through "spinners" that take your text and modify it through replacing words/phrases with similar equivalents. This lets you take one article and turning it into 5-10+ unique ones, even though they still discuss the same things. It would be a shame if a service like this was marketed towards those interested in privacy, it would probably break t…

I’ve found plenty of articles that seem to be run through these spinners, but hand made corrections are likely to be necessary (unless it can be automated with ML for example) as you can almost always tell that something is odd based on context lacking word choices

And thats exactly what newer programs do, look at AppSumo and its practically all of them. The older gen simply used a giant dictionary, then picked a random option from the list of acceptable choices.

Re: US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers

#48

Post by vmoore »

MonkeyMalarky wrote: post #24
dehrmann wrote: post #8

Plans? I assumed lots of people were already working on this. There's already a lot of training data out there, and I suspect most users can be identified by use of a handful of uncommon trigrams and sentence stats. I know you can recognize things I've written at work because they have real em dashes—people rarely type with those.

Someone unintentionally did something similar with HN comments to find users who sound most similar to you/eachother and people were finding their throwaway and alt accounts.

Yes I recall that: 'Find Your Hacker News Doppelgänger':

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27568709

Re: US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers

#49

Post by vmoore »

If I want to write anonymously, I cycle my text through Google Translate multiple times and keep all the grammatical errors intact. So, English > Italian, and then Italian > French, then back to English.

I also pass it into Hemingway[0] first to make my text lean and non-superfluous.

[0] https://hemingwayapp.com/

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