"Pseudpocalypse"... why not "pseudocalypse" or "pseudoapocalypse"?
As an aside, it's always surprising to see how English speakers split Greek words like "Apocalypse". That is to say, they always split them in the middle of Greek syllables, or just drop letters like "pseud[o][a]pocalypse" and often in a way that ends up sounding clunky and weird even in English.
Can't think of other examples now. Brain going to sleepzzzz....
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].
Looks like the site was taken down. I was curious who wrote the most like me, given that I don't have any alt accounts, but I guess weighing privacy over my curiosity is a good thing in the big picture
I've gotten several dozen accounts banned on reddit over the years. I don't remember the names of them all. It would be hilarious to me if someone mined the archives and stitched them all together.
I wondered something almost the opposite the other day. With consistent interaction with chat bots and AI output, their linguistic ticks are surely bleeding into every day speech ("smoking gun" and other turns of phrase). What if our linguistic output starts to conform?
> Do they, incorrectly, position their adverbial clauses?
Underrated line.
One would think that it could be possible to make a tool that takes some text and "anonymizes" it by making it a little more standard and boring (uniforming punctuation and sentence structure, changing words with some synonyms, etc). Maybe wouldn't make it particularly compelling, but would be valuable for political dissidents and other people with a high threat model.
So anonymity of written speech is toast. We should, however, strive to preserve other forms of anonymity. For example, donations given to political causes should be kept confidential. Let protesters wear masks up to the point where they break the law.
No just use a text-mixer: in goes your text, set parameters to have output match <scapegoat> (or just pick "standard_Neanderthal_3"), out comes text conveying the message you wrote, in the style of your choosing.
Of course that would also strip the attributes that made it your creation.
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 interesting, but could also just be a completely humanless bot.
AI is clearly the correct answer to this specific problem: Claude can not identify another writer if they use Claude (or another LLM) enough to massage the text.
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.
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.
Things like it have happened. The Unabomber was identified through his writing idiosyncrasies.
Lots of criminals have been identified by reanalyzing old DNA samples using data and genealogical techniques that weren't possible at the time the samples were left.
This is the kind of thing that is totally technically plausible, and useful to intelligence groups but not the general public, and therefore I would assume it is 100% in production in international intelligence agencies. But nothing we can "prove" without getting shot.
Similar to ultra-accurate multimedia geolocation models.
> 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 like your car being tracked everywhere, so you stop carrying a phone and you somehow convince lawmakers to ban license plates. No problem, your car will still be tracked using tiny scratches or unique pinging sounds from the engine. Or say you don’t like being tracked on the internet, so you lock down your browser profile, buy stuff only with Monero, and connect through a chain of three VPNs. That’s OK. You’ll still be identified through how you wiggle your finger as you scroll down the page. We’re all just too unique, and the information theoretic limit is coming for us.
Forensic research, NSA, Palantir…
Btw 42. Sleep, eat, have sex, have fun, be useful.
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.
As long as you're fine with losing your distinctive voice (which should be taken as table stakes for people who value anonymity to the extent of worrying about this), it's perfectly reasonable to use tools to stymie stylometry. I'm not even suggesting using an LLM (which may or may not be sufficient, it would be difficult to verify either way); it would suffice to have a tool that rewrites your prose (or analyzes it and flags it for manual correction, etc.) if it isn't written in, say, a form where every sentence is primitive subject-verb-object, limited to the 1,000 most common English words, with no contractions, idioms, or exotic punctuation. Yes, this doesn't completely eliminate all possibly identifying bits of entropy, but it would more than suffice for hiding in a crowd ("hiding" in the sense of obviously standing out as someone trying not to be noticed, and as long as you're also careful about your opsec in other ways, like time of posting, etc).
"Pseudpocalypse"... why not "pseudocalypse" or "pseudoapocalypse"?
As an aside, it's always surprising to see how English speakers split Greek words like "Apocalypse". That is to say, they always split them in the middle of Greek syllables, or just drop letters like "pseud[o][a]pocalypse" and often in a way that ends up sounding clunky and weird even in English.
Can't think of other examples now. Brain going to sleepzzzz....
Entropy is unfortunately a very bad metric to estimate if these identification techniques will scale. Plugging my work here as example: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-55296-6
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
Looks like the site was taken down. I was curious who wrote the most like me, given that I don't have any alt accounts, but I guess weighing privacy over my curiosity is a good thing in the big picture
I've gotten several dozen accounts banned on reddit over the years. I don't remember the names of them all. It would be hilarious to me if someone mined the archives and stitched them all together.
I wondered something almost the opposite the other day. With consistent interaction with chat bots and AI output, their linguistic ticks are surely bleeding into every day speech ("smoking gun" and other turns of phrase). What if our linguistic output starts to conform?
> Do they, incorrectly, position their adverbial clauses? Underrated line.
That whole paragraph is clever :)
Related articles:
- 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
One would think that it could be possible to make a tool that takes some text and "anonymizes" it by making it a little more standard and boring (uniforming punctuation and sentence structure, changing words with some synonyms, etc). Maybe wouldn't make it particularly compelling, but would be valuable for political dissidents and other people with a high threat model.
Does anyone have some tools to share?
Not sure if you are joking.
Try ChatGPT.com
So anonymity of written speech is toast. We should, however, strive to preserve other forms of anonymity. For example, donations given to political causes should be kept confidential. Let protesters wear masks up to the point where they break the law.
> So anonymity of written speech is toast.
No just use a text-mixer: in goes your text, set parameters to have output match <scapegoat> (or just pick "standard_Neanderthal_3"), out comes text conveying the message you wrote, in the style of your choosing.
Of course that would also strip the attributes that made it your creation.
Hmm, the Kill Puppies Movement received $500,000,000 from an anonymous donor.
yes but no, can't we just ask AI to sufficiently shuffle our words or for algos to do so?
"boom", pseudoanonymity (spell?) restored?
for future words, sure. but lots of people have an extensive volume of word they already published with the hope / expectation of remaining anonymous.
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 interesting, but could also just be a completely humanless bot.
[0] https://matt.might.net
AI is clearly the correct answer to this specific problem: Claude can not identify another writer if they use Claude (or another LLM) enough to massage the text.
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.
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.
downvoted because the government doing stuff is communism
This always seems theoretical. Has it happened?
As mentioned in a comment above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016
Things like it have happened. The Unabomber was identified through his writing idiosyncrasies.
Lots of criminals have been identified by reanalyzing old DNA samples using data and genealogical techniques that weren't possible at the time the samples were left.
> The Unabomber was identified through his writing idiosyncrasies.
By his brother, apparently. His brother read the manifesto, and said, “hey, sounds eerily familiar!”
But wouldn’t it be deliciously ironic if A.I. had caught Kaczynski‽
This is the kind of thing that is totally technically plausible, and useful to intelligence groups but not the general public, and therefore I would assume it is 100% in production in international intelligence agencies. But nothing we can "prove" without getting shot.
Similar to ultra-accurate multimedia geolocation models.
> 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 like your car being tracked everywhere, so you stop carrying a phone and you somehow convince lawmakers to ban license plates. No problem, your car will still be tracked using tiny scratches or unique pinging sounds from the engine. Or say you don’t like being tracked on the internet, so you lock down your browser profile, buy stuff only with Monero, and connect through a chain of three VPNs. That’s OK. You’ll still be identified through how you wiggle your finger as you scroll down the page. We’re all just too unique, and the information theoretic limit is coming for us.
Forensic research, NSA, Palantir…
Btw 42. Sleep, eat, have sex, have fun, be useful.
Useful to whom?
See, I used "whom", messing up my fingerprint.
Just be useful. To community, to family, to company, to yourself.
Sometimes I see people that consume and take only. (I am not judging, I just observe.)
See the classic Gwern post: https://gwern.net/death-note-anonymity
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.
As long as you're fine with losing your distinctive voice (which should be taken as table stakes for people who value anonymity to the extent of worrying about this), it's perfectly reasonable to use tools to stymie stylometry. I'm not even suggesting using an LLM (which may or may not be sufficient, it would be difficult to verify either way); it would suffice to have a tool that rewrites your prose (or analyzes it and flags it for manual correction, etc.) if it isn't written in, say, a form where every sentence is primitive subject-verb-object, limited to the 1,000 most common English words, with no contractions, idioms, or exotic punctuation. Yes, this doesn't completely eliminate all possibly identifying bits of entropy, but it would more than suffice for hiding in a crowd ("hiding" in the sense of obviously standing out as someone trying not to be noticed, and as long as you're also careful about your opsec in other ways, like time of posting, etc).