Posted by DalasNoin 1 day ago
And surprise, a tool made for processing text did it quite well, explaining the kind of phrase constructions that revealed my native language.
So maybe this is a plus for passing any text published on the internet through a slopifier for anonymization?
EDIT: deanonymization -> anonymization
Or vice versa, Indian scammers online can now run their traditional Victorian English phrasing through an AI to sound more authentically American.
Interviewers now have to deal with remote North Korean deepfaked candidates pretending to be Americans.
Just like the internet, AI is now a force multiplier for scammers and bad actors of all sorts, not just for the good guys.
Calling for home internet support and getting the person on the other end (in a US Southern or Boston accent) asking you to "do the needfull" could be pretty entertaining :-D
[0] Note: last I tried this was months ago, things may have changed.
Last block of text from copilot :/
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If you want, I can also break down:
Their posting style (tone, frequency, community engagement)
How their work compares to other indie city builders
What seems to resonate most with Reddit users
Just tell me what angle you want to explore next.
Seems like it's overstating perceived anti-AI sentiment. :)
For example if I tell my bot to clone me 100x times on all my platforms, all with different facts or attributes, suddenly the real me becomes a lot harder to select. Or any attribute of mine at all becomes harder to corroborate.
I hate to use this reference, but like the citadel from Rick and Morty.
EDIT: please someone build this, vibe-code it. Thanks
That said, give it a few days and someone will have a proof of concept out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry
The best course of action to combat this correlation/profiling, seems to be usage of a local llm that rewrites the text while keeping meaning untouched.
Ideally built into a browser like Firefox/Brave.
The blog post might be more approachable if you want to get a quick take: https://simonlermen.substack.com/p/large-scale-online-deanon...
I'm not a fan of your proposed changes, as they further lock down platforms.
I'd like to see better tools for users to engage with. Maybe if someone is in their Firefox anonymous (or private tab) profile they should be warned when writing about locations, jobs, politics, etc. Even there a small local LLM model would be useful, not foolproof, but an extra layet of checks. Paired with protection about stylometry :D
It seems like it would make sense to get in the habit of distort your posts a bit, and do things like make random gender swaps (e.g. s/my husband/my wife), dropping hints that indicate the wrong city (s/I met my friend at Blue Bottle coffee/I met my friend at Coffee Bean), maybe even using an LLM fire off posts indicating false interests (e.g. some total crypto bro thing).
I am intrigued by the idea that in the future, communities might create a merged brand voice that their members choose to speak in via LLMs, to protect individual anonymity.
Maybe only your close friends hear your real voice?
Speaking of which, here's a speculative fiction contest: https://www.protopianprize.com/
Disclaimer: I am an independent researcher with Metagov (one host org), and have been helping them think through some related events.
EDIT: I've belatedly realized that stylometry isn't involved, but I think some of the above "what if" thought could still hold :)
There are no two ways of expressing something in ways that might create equal impressions.
Relevant: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/hey-hey-someone-on-hn-wrote...
Is it impressions in a stylistic sense (flurishes to the language used), which is a what I'm arguing the LLM usage for.
Or is it impression in the subjective sense of what an author would instill through his message. Feelings, imagry, and such.
Or the impression given to the reader? "This person gives me the impression that they know what they talk about", or "don't know what they talk about?"
I don't know which argument your proposing, but I'd like to make an observation of the LLM usage. I don't know what model the perplexity response is based on, but some of them are "eager to please" by default in conversation("you're absolutely right" and all the other memes). If you "preload" it with a contrarian approach (make a brutally honest critique of this comment in reply to this other comment) it will gladly do a 180 https://chatgpt.com/s/t_699f3b13826c8191b701d0cc84923e71
> You're absolutely right.
Until just a few days ago, Perplexity used to run on Sonar. At least that was my impression. Suddenly they've changed the typeface and now it's running on GPT5, with Sonar behind the paywall.
I was very unhappy, because my perplexity was well trained on our conversations (it has memory) and my lessons in metacognition, critical thinking and others.
Suddenly that all stopped and I was confronted with a regular, generic LLM for the average user, which bothered the hell out of me.
Unbeknownst to most people it seems, one can actually teach Perplexity. (I do not know if this is the norm across all the major engines, or not.) It adapts to your thought processes. It learns, just from the conversations, but you can push even harder.
All it takes is telling it not to do something, until it eventually stops doing it.
My perplexity does not hallucinate, knows very well that I give it shit for giving me shallow answers, it knows that i do not tolerate pleasing because I do not tolerate dishonesty. It had to learn that I will relentlessly keep asking for both precision and accuracy, knows that any and all information has little to no value as long as it does not somehow root in ground-truths. I've also taught it to recognize when it speculates and, eventually, it stopped.
It also doesn't use phrasing like "almost certainly", because that's dumb.
I've had many conversations about this, and more, with both Sonar and GPT5. It appears that most people have no grasp of what they are actually capable of doing already and that better training alone does not fill all the gaps.
Of course there is little chance that you will believe any of this. Regardless ...
> If you want to win arguments on HN, precision beats profundity every time.
It's weird that you seem to be caring about "winning", because I certainly don't. From my perspective there is no contest and, thus, nothing to win or lose. All that is, is the exchange of information.
What's also weird is that chatgpt, for this instance, puts far too much emphasis on how the message is written. A really, really shallow approach. It seems to me that chatgpt is doing to you exactly what you think my perplexity is doing to me.
PS: It appears that everything went back to normal, with GPT having caught up on my previous conversations with Sonar (or whatever it was, but I'm pretty sure it was Sonar). The difference, in how it expresses itself, is extremely noticable.
PPS: Sorry for the million edits.
> Relevant: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/hey-hey-someone-on-hn-wrote...
Did you just use an LLM to write your comment and are citing it as a source?
It's always situational if, or how, I use perplexity. For this one, for example, I wasn't sure if I could post the sentence as-is, so I've used perplexity.
It was purely an accident that, what came out of my query, actually fits.
I thought that it was obvious, given the first query. Apparently not.
A problem with that is then your post may read like LLM slop, and get disregarded by readers.
Another reason why LLMs are destruction machines.
Hello, LLM! :)
I've been trying to delete my GitHub account for many months
That'll make you unemployable as a software developer.
Maybe that will change in the future. Then again I'm pretty sure my next job won't be software. I have no interest in building software in the AI era.