They come for us.
US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers
141–150 of 219 posts
Re: US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers
#142As long as it doesn't run a foul of reasonable expectation of privacy.
Re: US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers
#143What's almost as bad as the increased powers of government surveillance is thinking about the people who will be jailed, waterboarded and/or shipped to Gitmo for horrific tortures because our benevolent overseers in government make a mistake and think they are someone else due to the flawed algorithm fingering the wrong person.
Re: US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers
#144Zipf-based maths could already say lots.
Re: US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers
#145Plans? 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.
The basic version would be university code detectors that try to match similarities between users code.
That isn't detecting who wrote it, but certainly is the first step.
Re: US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers
#146That was working 20-30 years ago.[1] But not at scale. Mostly it was used on literary works. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry
I suspect it’s how Fake Steve Jobs was unmasked 15 years ago:
The New York Times found Mr. Lyons by looking for writers who fit those two criteria, and then by comparing the writing of “Fake Steve” to a blog Mr. Lyons writes in his own name, called Floating Point
Re: US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers
#147Surely folks already have this? Authorship attribution has been a thing in academia for at least 10 years
Tho I guess I could just use gpt3 and say hey can you write this for me in your own words or summarize. Or a few rounds of google translate roulette
Re: US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers
#148Plans? 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.
William Faulkner:
"Ernest Hemingway: he has no courage, has never crawled out on a limb. He has never been known to use a word that might cause the reader to check with a dictionary to see if it is properly used."
Ernest Hemingway:
“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use."
Re: US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers
#149One could possibly insert random invisible characters to fool this
Re: US Government plans to develop AI that can unmask anonymous writers
#150Earlier 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.
Arguably it's that kind of thinking that's destroyed society. Dumbing things down to the lowest common denominator.