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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

#161

Post by matheusmoreira »

copperx wrote: post #56
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.

Is this algorithm published?

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

#162

Post by challenger-derp »

vmoore wrote: 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/

^ In case anyone is interested in learning more, the first part of what vmoore is doing is termed back-translation.

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

#163

Post by MaysonL »

SoftTalker wrote: post #130
noir_lord wrote: post #96

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.

"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.

“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.” Mark Twain

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

#164

Post by challenger-derp »

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)

> that's not actually implemented

That's my understanding as well.

> it's a convenient talking point in the west

When online comments get worked up about The Social Credit System, a key thing I believe they're trying to do is spread awareness of how disturbing it is that a government is even considering such a thing that, as we understand it, is closely related to being a core technology in an authoritarian dystopia.

While it's not implemented at scale, the unnerving fact is that govt policy makers did a careful enough take on a social credit system to decide that it was worthwhile investing (probably non-trivial amounts of ) money and resources into exploring it and did eventually reach a point where they were a handful of steps short of wide-scale implementation.

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

#165

Post by ergodic1 »

black_puppydog wrote: post #157

As someone who expects this to have happened years ago (maybe not under the moniker of AI but who cares) I'm more shocked by the fact that they'd publically announce this. The chilling effects of this will be all too real. If this works it's pretty much the equivalent of a mandatory state ID on every online interaction. If it doesn't work very well, then it's going to be that, plus the risk of randomly being flagged.…

Won't there be a countermeasure? A grammarly for privacy that takes your intent and outputs an un-anonymizable text?

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

#166

Post by zimpenfish »

ergodic1 wrote: post #165
black_puppydog wrote: post #157

As someone who expects this to have happened years ago (maybe not under the moniker of AI but who cares) I'm more shocked by the fact that they'd publically announce this. The chilling effects of this will be all too real. If this works it's pretty much the equivalent of a mandatory state ID on every online interaction. If it doesn't work very well, then it's going to be that, plus the risk of randomly being flagged.…

Won't there be a countermeasure? A grammarly for privacy that takes your intent and outputs an un-anonymizable text?

Wouldn't surprise me if, eventually, it turned out that things like Grammarly were being used to train it in the first place.

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

#167

Post by achenatx »

i thought they had done this with the federalist papers to determine which founding fathers wrote which papers (1996)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/30204514#:~:text=They%20were%20....

This is 2017 https://towardsdatascience.com/hamilton-a-text-analysis-of-t...

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

#168

Post by zimpenfish »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #116
ok_dad wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I someday hope for style transfer for language, so I can write a paragraph and convert it to Michael Creighton's writing style.

Kennyblanken opens up the fifteen inches of aluminum that is his aging Macintosh Book Pro, produced by a company laughably named after a piece of fruit and formerly headed by a brilliant but somewhat psychopathetic man, now long pushing up the daisies, and taps out the commands to login to his account on the antiquated and increasingly inaccurately named hackernews, bathing in the yellow-orange theme as he stretches…

To be a proper Dan Brown, you'd need to start with "Internet Commentator KennyBlanken" (or some other prefixed descriptor.)

cf [1]

"I think what enabled the first word to tip me off that I was about to spend a number of hours in the company of one of the worst prose stylists in the history of literature was this. Putting curriculum vitae details into complex modifiers on proper names or definite descriptions is what you do in journalistic stories about deaths; you just don't do it in describing an event in a narrative."

[1] http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000844.h...

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

#169

Post by jongjong »

I'm sure this has already existed for years. The AI technology needed to implement this has exited for years. You just need to do web crawling and keyword and link matching.

You don't even need a 'writing fingerprint', you just need to parse comments which reveal identifying information such as 'I participated in project x', 'I taught at university y', 'I invested in startup z'... then when you combine all the identifying information, you can narrow down the pool of possible matches to a single person.

You could probably do it with just basic text matching, no AI required.

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

#170

Post by dlkf »

club_tropical wrote: post #101
noir_lord wrote: post #96

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.

> This was a tradeoff to appeal to people whose vocabulary is narrow, not improve comprehension.

”Comprehension” is not some audience-independent property of a text. Comprehension is what happens when a text is well-calibrated for an audience. If your audience is unlikely to know the word ”obviate” (which seems true of many engineering settings, where the audience is international), you absolutely improve comprehension by replacing it with words the audience is more likely to know.

I agree with you that ”obviate” sounds better, and in a setting like a blog post, monograph, or even an hn comment, that’s probably what I’d use. But in e.g. a work email for colleagues in another country, you reduce the risk of miscommunication by following OP’s suggestion.

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