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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

#171

Post by autoexec »

klabb3 wrote: post #85
lajamerr wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The next step after is to build an AI to convert your style of writing to another person's style.

Exactly. You barely need "AI" for this. Changing style enough to put some sand in a sophisticated text identifier could be as simple as introducing some spelling and grammar variations. It could easily be commoditized (isn't grammarly doing this already minus the privacy part?). Of all cat and mouse games LE and intelligence are playing, for this one I'm betting on the mouse.

Just write all your 'sensitive' texts in leetspeak, use very few words, and very short words and it should be fine. It's like the typing equivalent of cutting letters out of magazines.

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

#172

Post by PhantomBKB »

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.…

In the name of national security, the agencies do whatever they like, and what's worse, people buy the narrative

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

#174

Post by bergenty »

submeta wrote: post #139

Being 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.

But also think of the anonymous oppressors

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

#175

Post by mdp2021 »

noir_lord wrote: post #96
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.

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.

> not impress them with word salad

No. Look, I had some "fight" in these pages two days ago because somebody complained of my style.

It is the farthest from legitimate to suppose that one's intention is to impress - that is accusing people of childishness, and you need to have solid grounds to suppose that. There are higher chances that one wants to be _precise_.

That would be precision in the expression of some content, to have such expression match as perfectly as possible a defined structure of thoughts you elaborated. You may want to describe the facts precisely, and/or the mental processes that those facts provoke.

Also some image subtly (and not so subtly) emerged, days ago, of "language as a cage": but if you want to express exactly some "/that/", it is the language that will have to provide the means - as opposed to a horrifying idea of "expressing what language allows".

There are contexts in which it is of paramount importance that the reader understands the message (e.g. instructions) - pay attention towards using the most digestible expression then. But when you want your content to be expressed as the defined sculpture of structures of ideas, while many different expressions are possible they are pretty much "what they are, because they are what they should be".

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

#176

Post by CTDOCodebases »

RobRivera wrote: post #88
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'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

Remember to do it with your code as well.

I doubt TrueCrypt developers decided that it was Not Secure As Microsoft’s bitlocker after considering the paper that got released the following year.[0]

[0] - https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurit...

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

#177

Post by mdp2021 »

Timpy wrote: post #114
club_tropical wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't that how communication works? Understanding your audience and "appealing" to them does improve comprehension for them.

> your audience

There lies the spring coil. The less it is established what your audience is, the more you shift from "calibrated expression" to a form of expression which is as absolute and universal as possible. (See my previous post here, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33045225 .) If you have a message for an audience, you will try and condition its expression according the audience; the more the audience is abstract, the more the expression will be unconditioned, as if intended for an ideal audience.

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

#178

Post by Mordisquitos »

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?

One relatively straightforward countermeasure would be to feed your text through multiple rounds of machine translation using DeepL, Google Translate, and other similar services and applying corrections when necessary. That should break any personally identifying features in your original text.

That of course has its own risks, if you assume full government access to providers and unlimited surveillance capabilities. If you are fully paranoid you could even run your text through a local instance of (less accurate) Apertium[0] for the first few rounds, or even for the whole process if you find the result is different enough from your original.

[0] https://www.apertium.org/

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

#179

Post by retrac »

noir_lord wrote: post #108
club_tropical wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a native speaker, it's very unpleasant to write like that. I will if necessary for effective communication, but it's like wearing a straitjacket. It can be awful to read, too. Rarer synonyms and the phrasal verbs (both commonly avoided in a simple style) are sometimes necessary to avoid excessive repetition.

It is one of the downsides of being a native speaker. I write pretty much like how I speak. It's hard to use it like a foreign language, but that's what technical international English feels like to me, in a way. In my experience, fluent second language learners master that style more easily than native speakers do.

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

#180

Post by mdp2021 »

groffee wrote: post #150
SoftTalker wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

> destroy[ing] society

More precisely: not just having people less intellectually exercised¹, but also and especially creating some sort of "demand" that "things have to be simple". Non-recognition of complexity is also one of the cracks allowing populism. Your duty is to "spend one further thought", while some instances seem to defend an idea of an "as-if-constitutional right to reduced consideration".

(¹ I wrote the other day, «I also believe that "Now drop and give me twenty" will return us fitter personnel than "Please, be fed from a straw"»)

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