Forensic linguists use grammar, syntax and vocabulary to help crack cold cases
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Re: Forensic linguists use grammar, syntax and vocabulary to help crack cold cases
#2> Spellings such as “wilfully” for “willfully” and “clew” for “clue” pointed to someone from the Chicago area, for example. Eventually, the linguistic evidence was strong enough to issue a search warrant for the home of a reclusive mathematician named Theodore Kaczynski, raised in Chicago but living in rural Montana
One thing Kaczynski's brother noticed as particularly idiosyncratic was the consistent use of the phrase "you can’t eat your cake and have it too", which is usually phrased as "you can't have your cake and eat it too".
Re: Forensic linguists use grammar, syntax and vocabulary to help crack cold cases
#3I wonder if distros like Tails [0] are going to start shipping lightweight LLMs specifically to reword messages. Though I’m also not sure how low of a spec you can go and still run an LLM decent enough to not be excruciatingly slow.
[0]: https://tails.net/
Re: Forensic linguists use grammar, syntax and vocabulary to help crack cold cases
#4Relatedly, if you have a decently sized writing sample on the Internet, LLMs can do this to you at scale: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/doPbyzPgKdjedohud/the-case-f...
Re: Forensic linguists use grammar, syntax and vocabulary to help crack cold cases
#5This type of work was used to find Satoshi at least once. This is the one I remember:
https://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/satoshi-nakam...
Re: Forensic linguists use grammar, syntax and vocabulary to help crack cold cases
#6Cool XX century story but mass use of LLM generated text will obfuscate any such individual differences. My kids already use LLMs extensively to verify and sometimes generate homework completely.
Re: Forensic linguists use grammar, syntax and vocabulary to help crack cold cases
#7> Spellings such as “wilfully” for “willfully” and “clew” for “clue” pointed to someone from the Chicago area, for example. Eventually, the linguistic evidence was strong enough to issue a search warrant for the home of a reclusive mathematician named Theodore Kaczynski, raised in Chicago but living in rural Montana One thing Kaczynski's brother noticed as particularly idiosyncratic was the consistent use of the phra…
> Indeed, this used to be the most common form of the expression until the 1930s–1940s, when it was overtaken by the have-eat variant.
— https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=You_can%27t_have_...
Re: Forensic linguists use grammar, syntax and vocabulary to help crack cold cases
#8Here's your clew (sic) that the article may not be so reliable: It credits the FBI's linguistic analysis for locating the Unabomber, when in reality, it was his own brother who said “hey, it sounds like Ted.”
Re: Forensic linguists use grammar, syntax and vocabulary to help crack cold cases
#9I think we can expect sophisticated criminals to start using AI to rewrite their correspondence.
Re: Forensic linguists use grammar, syntax and vocabulary to help crack cold cases
#10I think we can expect sophisticated criminals to start using AI to rewrite their correspondence.
Perhaps similarly to how ransom notes would be written with letters from newspapers.