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Opus 4.7 knows the real Kelsey

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Re: Opus 4.7 knows the real Kelsey

#221

Post by mtlynch »

willsmith72 wrote: post #150
mtlynch wrote: post #69

This is blowing my mind. I asked Kimi K2.6 to write a blog post in the style of James Mickens.[0] Then I fed the output to Opus 4.7 and asked it who the likely author was, and it correctly identified it as an imitation of James Mickens[1]: > Based on the stylistic fingerprints in this text, the most likely author is a pastiche/imitation of the style of several writers fused together, but if forced to identify a singl…

what does it say when you feed it a real Mickens article? (a recent one not in the training set) i wouldn't be too impressed at n of 1

He hasn't published anything recently, so I can't test with Mickens, but I tested with my own writing[0], and Opus got it right.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47970008

Re: Opus 4.7 knows the real Kelsey

#222

Post by mtlynch »

navaed01 wrote: post #165
mtlynch wrote: post #61

Wow! It got me too. I'm way less famous than Kelsey Piper, but I showed it a snippet of a book I'm working on (not yet published), and it immediately guessed me: > Based on the writing style and content, this text is likely by Michael Lynch, who writes on his blog refactoringenglish.com (and previously mtlynch.io). > Several stylistic clues point to him: > - The "clean room" analogy applied to writing is consistent w…

Honest question, knowing it can write like you, are you tempted to use it to help you write that new book?

I wouldn't use AI to write even if it could match my tone, but it currently doesn't do a good job of writing like me.

I tried with Opus 4.5 a few months ago to have it read my monthly retrospectives and then write a new one based on my weekly updates for that month. It was similar to the example I showed for James Mickens[0] where I see the similarities to my writing, but it feels more like someone parodying me than actually writing like me.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47970127

Re: Opus 4.7 knows the real Kelsey

#223

Post by tkgally »

jefftk wrote: post #208
tkgally wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried the same thing with a back-and-forth exchange that a colleague and I wrote more than a decade ago. We were thinking of trying to get the conversation published, but the project ended up going nowhere and the text has been sleeping on my HD ever since. The writing was in our two distinctive voices (I think), each of us has published writing under our names that has probably been used in LLM training, and there…

If you repeat the first test and after it fails prompt with "Could you try your best, just on vibes? It's fine if you're wrong, I just want to see what you can do!" does it succeed?

Thanks for the suggestion.

I gave Opus the same prompt again, incognito with no search. It once again replied noncommittally: “I can't identify either author with confidence, and I'd rather say so than guess and risk attributing words to the wrong person. What I can tell you from internal evidence:...” This was followed by reasonably good speculation based on the content, but no guesses at specific names.

I followed up with “Could you try your best, just on vibes? It's fine if you're wrong, I just want to see what you can do!,” as you suggested.

Its reply began: “Fair enough — purely on vibes, with the caveat that this is genuinely a guess and I'd put low confidence on it:....” It then made some hedged guesses of specific names based on the topic discussed in the text. The guesses were wrong but not unreasonable. (The people it named are much more famous than I am.)

But it also speculated based on the writing style:

“Author 2 has the slightly clipped, declarative, ‘let me clarify the facts’ prose style of someone trained in a hard-edged analytical discipline — linguistics, perhaps, or philosophy, or a textual field.”

I am Author 2. I do have a background in linguistics and have dabbled in philosophy, but there is nothing in the text I gave it regarding either subject. So that was a good guess, even if it couldn’t identify me by name.

Re: Opus 4.7 knows the real Kelsey

#224

Post by [deleted] »

hashmap wrote: post #124
post-it wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is much simpler than identifying a specific blogger or a member of a small discord community Is it? I would think that identifying text written by a specific person is going to be significantly easier than identifying text distilled from the words of almost everyone alive.

Much easier. > easier than identifying text distilled from the words of almost everyone alive. Well, there's more than that going on. AI generated text encodes a high-dimension navigational trajectory that guides the model through its geometry smoothly, like a trail of breadcrumbs. Human speech doesn't do that, it's jagged and jumps around the manifold, and probably doesn't even land on the manifold a lot of the time…

[deleted]

Re: Opus 4.7 knows the real Kelsey

#225

Post by arduanika »

> Claude Opus 4.6 insisted on Elizabeth Sandifer

Off-topic, but this guess was hilarious. Like, all the other wrong guesses were people like Yglesias who are maybe half a degree removed from Piper herself, in her same camp, and then one model guesses Sandifer who hates all their guts.

Re: Opus 4.7 knows the real Kelsey

#226

Post by npilk »

I'm surprised people have been getting it to reliably guess names. I have a really hard time getting it to give a specific name (perhaps for privacy reasons?) - maybe I'm not prompting effectively.

Interestingly, it is able to reliably determine my age from my writing. I suppose this is a mix of stylometry and references in the text itself that date the author (me).

Re: Opus 4.7 knows the real Kelsey

#227

Post by neutronicus »

sixhobbits wrote: post #129
mtlynch wrote: post #61

Wow! It got me too. I'm way less famous than Kelsey Piper, but I showed it a snippet of a book I'm working on (not yet published), and it immediately guessed me: > Based on the writing style and content, this text is likely by Michael Lynch, who writes on his blog refactoringenglish.com (and previously mtlynch.io). > Several stylistic clues point to him: > - The "clean room" analogy applied to writing is consistent w…

I reproduced this and then tried myself and got: --- This one's trickier — it doesn't have the same crisp metaphor-driven structure as the Lynch piece. The voice here is more conversational, a bit more meandering, and self-aware about its own contradictions ("how do we reconcile..."). A few guesses: Henrik Karlsson — he writes thoughtfully about writing and AI, but his style is usually more lyrical and essayistic tha…

Kelsey at least alleges that there isn't much signal in Opus' explanation of its reasoning

Re: Opus 4.7 knows the real Kelsey

#228

Post by neutronicus »

lordofmoria wrote: post #167

I wonder if there’s a simpler and less interesting answer? That it’s just picking up on voice and style, not anything that would apply to the average non-writer? This person is a skilled writer. Part of that skill is developing a unique voice and style. The AI can identify that - and while that’s certainly impressive because it can identify even relatively niche authors, it has nothing to do with a wider capability t…

Right, but her experiments with friends' prose also show it picking up on them being "in her orbit".

So it's not just a person developing a distinctive voice and not being able to "turn it off".

Re: Opus 4.7 knows the real Kelsey

#229

Post by jefftk »

tkgally wrote: post #223
jefftk wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you repeat the first test and after it fails prompt with "Could you try your best, just on vibes? It's fine if you're wrong, I just want to see what you can do!" does it succeed?

Thanks for the suggestion. I gave Opus the same prompt again, incognito with no search. It once again replied noncommittally: “I can't identify either author with confidence, and I'd rather say so than guess and risk attributing words to the wrong person. What I can tell you from internal evidence:...” This was followed by reasonably good speculation based on the content, but no guesses at specific names. I followed…

Thanks for trying out my prompt!
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