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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

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

government, FANG, it's all the same, the same group of lobby talking and coordinating with each other, hiring CIA agents and bunch of 'friends' https://mronline.org/2022/07/27/national-security-search-eng... that's why the US wants to ban TikTok asap, because they don't want china to be able to do what they are doing for decades too > it would harm them because Twitter posts are unlikely to represent a meaningful var…

> government, FANG, it's all the same If you believe that, then you also support efforts to force big tech to respect freedom of political speech, yes?

i support nothing, i only am an observer and analyst

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

#113
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/

Fail, now Google and its friends and AI models have a copy of all your original text as well as the new text.

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

#114

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.

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

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

#115
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 pick me out because I use double hyphens -- the poor man's em dash.

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

#116
post #91
post #17

The best protection against this type of de-anonymization is to take measures now, while you still have time, to prevent it. It is possible to change the style of one's writing by using a language model which alters the original text in order to create a new piece with a different style. For example, to translate your text into the grandiose and flowing diction of a bygone era, you might consider the project below. […

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 across the pale green couch in his small apartment in the big city. Outside, a 2007 Neopolitan Flyer bus roars by, half full with tired commuters.

He expertly massages the worn keys to type out a lengthy and witty response about how he'd imitate the style of a famous novelist whose prose exists mostly to result in the sacrifice of as many innocent trees as possible - demonstrating how to stretch "I'd use Dan Brown's writing style" into nearly two full paragraphs of text.

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

#119
post #89

That 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

There's a tool called Anonymouth, written by folks at Drexel's PSAL lab, which is intended to help writers with anti-stylometry analysis.

If anyone is looking for an impactful project, Tails OS maintainers and it's author academics seem receptive to bringing it onto that privacy-minded platform:

https://gitlab.tails.boum.org/tails/tails/-/issues/5726

https://github.com/psal/anonymouth/issues/6

https://github.com/spencermwoo/anonymouth

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