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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

#101
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.

You can probably spot me at work because I use really simple words. I write obviate then I re-read and replace it with “removes the need to do $foo. Some writers at work forget that the goal of the written word is to communicate to the reader not impress them with word salad. I regard it the same as clever code (note: not the same as complex code) - written for the author not the reader.

Your example doesn't match the principles you highlighted. Obviate->remove is replacing a perfect-fit with a generic alternative. "Obviate" was neither a word salad nor complex, it was straight up (marginally) better. This was a tradeoff to appeal to people whose vocabulary is narrow, not improve comprehension.

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

#102
If it's an actual ML model then someone can leak it and develop countermeasures. If it's a contractor who claims to be AI but is actually some guy in a room in Maryland, that's not possible but also the results wouldn't be very reliable.

Of course, the article just says they're planning to do this. It doesn't say it's going to work, and our closest examples, forensic science like handwriting and blood spatters and polygraphs and all that, generally don't actually work.

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

#103
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.

yeah. I've read about this many years ago, and it had scared me enough to develop an alternative writing style for my squeaky clean real life persona

I wouldn't doubt for a second that NSA is already using shit like this for their global passive adversary thing

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

#106

Can’t I just feed my missive into an AI that reshapes the language but retains the data?

Sure but your output will probably have the same signature as well unless you keep updating the model each time. It’s already hard to do the first thing, almost no one is going to do step 2 for a comment on the internet.

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

#107
post #49

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/

Are you satisfied with the level it preserves your "voice"? Humor, style, metaphors, etc?

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

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can probably spot me at work because I use really simple words. I write obviate then I re-read and replace it with “removes the need to do $foo. Some writers at work forget that the goal of the written word is to communicate to the reader not impress them with word salad. I regard it the same as clever code (note: not the same as complex code) - written for the author not the reader.

Your example doesn't match the principles you highlighted. Obviate->remove is replacing a perfect-fit with a generic alternative. "Obviate" was neither a word salad nor complex, it was straight up (marginally) better. This was a tradeoff to appeal to people whose vocabulary is narrow, not improve comprehension.

People reading what I write are frequently users of English as a second language.

Expecting most of the English people to know obviate is pushing it, for someone using English as a second language it’s just adding complexity.

It’s about aiming where you expect the average reader to be.

Because you know the word don’t fall into the trap of assuming everyone else does.

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

#109
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. […

> export OPENAI_API_KEY=hunter2

lel

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