So South Park episode?
US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers
131–140 of 219 posts
Re: US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers
#132Plans? 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.
"If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter"
Re: US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Further violations will lead to the balances of your close friends and family being adjusted by -20%, and the balances of acquaintances being adjusted by -5%. Help protect against the threat of misinformation and safeguard your Balance for up to 28 days by reporting anything that you think could lead to harm. Remember, We're All In This Together.
> We're All In This Together. Sent chills down my spine.
Move along citizen.
Re: US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers
#134Of course, there now is a business opportunity to make style obfuscating AI transformers ...
Re: US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers
#135Earlier 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.
"Don't use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do." I would have sworn that was from Elements of Style but apparently it's a Mark Twain quote.
As a sesquipedalian, my writing is sesquipedalian.
Re: US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers
#136Writers plan to develop AI which makes their text un-umaskable.
That's indeed the best defense. But the purpose of that one is to catch the easy ones.
Re: US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a big counter intelligence man, so I love deliberately inserting randomness into potential identification metrics. In the words of martha stewart, it's a good thing
You probably don't want to associate yourself with a convicted criminal as a deflection technique.
We both have unfortunate usernames when it comes to that
Re: US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers
#138Plans? 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 pick me out because I use double hyphens -- the poor man's em dash.
On my phone the failure is manifest — it linebreaks between the hyphens.
Re: US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers
#139Being able to be anonymous is actually a valuable thing. Think of people in oppressive regimes.
I believe we need countermeasures, so we need to create algoriths that add fuzzyness to our writing to protect privacy.
Re: US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers
#140This already exists. There was actually someone who posted something on HN that would use your public profile to find your anonymous Reddit username and it found mine. That’s when I stopped anonymously using Reddit.