21–30 of 92 posts
One potential solution here I suppose is to make deanonymization or contributing to it a serious crime. I doubt that will happen in most places, though, since it’s often the government that wants to do this to its own citizens.
- Claude knows who you are: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Jkb4CBB7rf4XYP5eb/claude-kno...
- ~ Opus 4.7 is the first model to correctly guess who I am based on unpublished articles: https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/2044962428547695007
Also, I wonder about this analysis in the age of AI slop. I wonder how much that removes the identifying bits, vs how much carries through of the original prompt (e.g. topic and guidance). It's interesting that a pseudonymous blogs might take on very generic Claude-voice, which could be worthwhile if the topics were interesting, but could also just be a completely humanless bot.
> A stronger conjecture is that we’re heading towards a sort of generalized pseudpocalypse. Perhaps, in the future, if you interact with the world through essentially any high-bandwidth channel, then you identify yourself. Say you wear a mask in public and only speak by sub-vocalizing into a voice changer. That’s fine, you’ll still be identified using your body shape, gait, or chemical signature. Or say you don’t lik…
Useful to whom? See, I used "whom", messing up my fingerprint.
Sometimes I see people that consume and take only. (I am not judging, I just observe.)
Which quotes Tao on using deliberate disinformation to preserve anonymity.
> …one additional way to gain more anonymity is through deliberate disinformation. For instance, suppose that one reveals 100 independent bits of information about oneself. Ordinarily, this would cost 100 bits of anonymity (assuming that each bit was a priori equally likely to be true or false), by cutting the number of possibilities down by a factor of 2100; but if 5 of these 100 bits (chosen randomly and not revealed in advance) are deliberately falsified, then the number of possibilities increases again by a factor of (100 choose 5) ~ 226, recovering about 26 bits of anonymity.
Intentionally adding writing "tics", scheduling posts to appear between 2am and 6am in your timezone, or pretending to have a different gender/location/age should help a lot in staying pseudonymous for a while longer.
Huh, I just realized he (she?) was pseudonymous and not Matt Might[0] this whole time. Oops. Also, I wonder about this analysis in the age of AI slop. I wonder how much that removes the identifying bits, vs how much carries through of the original prompt (e.g. topic and guidance). It's interesting that a pseudonymous blogs might take on very generic Claude-voice, which could be worthwhile if the topics were interesti…
The problem, as the article correctly identifies, is that this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are tons of other cases (e.g. identifying a car without a license plate by the scratches) that AI is going to enable ... and in those cases we can't just get anonymity back by using an LLM.
This always seems theoretical. Has it happened?
Similar to ultra-accurate multimedia geolocation models.
There's been some interesting threads about stylometry over the years [1]. The top link was quite decent at unmasking HN alt accounts with basic ngram analysis whipped up in one day [2]. 1. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=stylometry 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33756141
This always seems theoretical. Has it happened?