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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

#191

Post by iinnPP »

lajamerr wrote: post #36
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.

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

I proposed this as an automated process for our provinces social services/inquiries email. The idea being that the text would be harder to use as a method of discrimination.

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

#192

Post by iinnPP »

jongjong wrote: post #169

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 identi…

I don't go around as an anonymous user and post a bunch of identification information.

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

#194

Post by denton-scratch »

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.

> most users can be identified

For some value of "identified". However good it is, it can't definitively nail someone as the author of a piece of text.

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

#195

Post by Gunax »

geysersam wrote: post #185
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.…

> If this works Seems like an impossible task. There's just not enough signal to noise ratio to make that distinction. Not if the goal is to distinguish among thousands of people. Among tens or hundreds, might work if they don't take any countermeasures.

Im not smart enough to know if this is the same thing as what you're saying, but it just doesnt seem like there are millions of writing styles. There might just be too many literary doppelgangers.

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

#196

Post by denton-scratch »

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.

Don't agree. Like the commenter upthread, I have for some years had the feeling that my language is bloated with subordinate clauses, and that I use too many ten-dollar words. It's easy to use flowery language to conceal from yourself the shallowness of your understanding. So I get out my Xacto knife, and cut out the crap. Sometimes.

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

#197

Post by iinnPP »

black_puppydog wrote: post #155
MichaelCollins wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tools like this probably fool traditional stylometry, but what about de-anonymization tools that find similar ideas , not writing style? Perhaps most people have boring common ideas they got from others, but the sort of people the US Government is most interested in are likely quirkier than most.

Then they'd literally just go after people because they think they might harbor certain ideas? "sir you are under arrest for maybe thinking about banning dairy production, which is at conflict with national security. We found an anonymous text online that has the same idea." Why even bother to come up with a pretext then?

To provide comfort to the masses that it was fair.

It would be trivial to mask text and change irrelevant opinions to be anonymous again. Though the real problem is related to posing as others.

Reminds me of ilillliillilill. There's a reason people use names like this.

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

#199

Post by teddyh »

christophilus wrote: post #190
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.…

> plus the risk of randomly being flagged This is 100% going to happen, so my guess is it can’t be authoritative. It’s likely to be used to whittle down a list so that humans can review the results. Feels like the beginning of a hybrid Minority Report + Enemy of the State movie. I’d watch that. I don’t want to live in that world, though.

> > plus the risk of randomly being flagged

> This is 100% going to happen, so my guess is it can’t be authoritative.

Why do you think that it won’t be authoritative?

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

#200

Post by jsjohnst »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #182
Shorel wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many times it's the other way around. Obviate has several cognates in romance languages, so it is straightforward. Now, the phrasal verbs that are so obvious to a native speaker, these are the real head-scratchers. Or street slang. It may sound like dumbing it down to you, but it actually adds complexity for a non-native.

Indeed. "Register": I immediately know what it means and it takes tenths of a second for me to make the decision to click (or not to). "Sign up": despite having a CEFR C2 level of English and using it at work every day, I still need to think for a few seconds if this is a registration or a login (cf. "sign in"). For a native speaker I suppose the latter is (marginally?) easier, but for a non-native, it's much harder,…

Your examples are very illustrative, but I would argue that both phrases suffer from being too generic. I wish that there wasn’t such a push for “one word” CTAs. Examples of alternatives I’d advocate for depending on context:

“Create an account”

“Subscribe to mailing list”

“Submit contest entry”

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