Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers

reclaimthenet.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 219 posts

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

#51

Post by hoosieree »

swayvil wrote: post #19

What we need is a speaking style anonymizer. Like a language translator except it translates your text into some kind of stylistic uniformness. We're flexible on that format. Anything legible and relatively easy to translate into. Call it ANONSPEAK. It will probably be, aesthetically, horrible.

There exists such a practice, and it is known as academic publishing.

Every verb is done in passive voice, punctuation is added - wherever possible - to make sentences appear more complex than they need be, and of course there is an effervescent use of sesquipedalian terms where shorter similes would otherwise suffice.

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

#53

Post by Zak »

I built something like that more than a decade ago to identify alter-egos in an online game from in-game chat. It was reasonably successful and I thought about commercial applications for it, but ultimately decided most things that could be used for are creepy or evil.

I remember hearing DARPA was actively seeking research in the field around that time. In principle, I'm not absolutely against my software being part of the chain of events that leads to the decision to kill someone, but I don't trust the US government (or, realistically, anybody else) to independently verify an identification made by such a system.

I'd be surprised if the three letter agencies aren't using something at least as good as what I wrote by now.

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

#55

Post by Kukumber »

hardnose wrote: post #16
xani_ wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"How dare they do it before us" USA next decade: "Posting bad things on twitter reduces your credit score"

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.

government, FANG, it's all the same, the same group of lobby talking and coordinating with each other, hiring CIA agents and bunch of 'friends'

https://mronline.org/2022/07/27/national-security-search-eng...

that's why the US wants to ban TikTok asap, because they don't want china to be able to do what they are doing for decades too

> it would harm them because Twitter posts are unlikely to represent a meaningful variable when predicting someone's creditworthiness.

people get fired and arrested already for posting stuff on twitter, in both the US and Europe, so no, it's not just just a "twitter moderation" thing

Ask yourself why they are allowed to exist and still operate despite unable to grow and are loosing money for years, talk about anti-competitive practices, unless it's in reality a government body in disguise

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

#56

Post by copperx »

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.

About 15 years ago, at JHU, I heard about an algorithm that detected a writer's gender with more than 90% of accuracy, and the NLP professor considered that problem solved.

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

#57

Post by copperx »

Zak wrote: post #53

I built something like that more than a decade ago to identify alter-egos in an online game from in-game chat. It was reasonably successful and I thought about commercial applications for it, but ultimately decided most things that could be used for are creepy or evil. I remember hearing DARPA was actively seeking research in the field around that time. In principle, I'm not absolutely against my software being part…

How sophisticated was your system? It sounds like you used cutting edge NLP techniques at the time.

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

#58

Post by hardnose »

Kukumber wrote: post #55
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.

government, FANG, it's all the same, the same group of lobby talking and coordinating with each other, hiring CIA agents and bunch of 'friends' https://mronline.org/2022/07/27/national-security-search-eng... that's why the US wants to ban TikTok asap, because they don't want china to be able to do what they are doing for decades too > it would harm them because Twitter posts are unlikely to represent a meaningful var…

> government, FANG, it's all the same

If you believe that, then you also support efforts to force big tech to respect freedom of political speech, yes?

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

#59

Post by [deleted] »

hardnose wrote: post #16
xani_ wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"How dare they do it before us" USA next decade: "Posting bad things on twitter reduces your credit score"

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.

[deleted]

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

#60

Post by wsinks »

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.

I forget that they're called em dashes -- but I also love to use them to offset what I say from other people.
Post reply on HN