Posted by ilamont 1 day ago
As for the credibility: of course this wasn’t a statistical approach at all. Also there was no standardized procedure to allow comparison by factor analysis. Of course you can compare apples with oranges or whatever.
So where to go from here? I don’t see any proof at all. This is proof that AI is infallible? No? A random approach that is absolutely not reliable because of at least being reproducible and reconstructive.
Claude knows what and how? Is it AI or a google search? Discord selling data? Posting on a public forum?
Your style is a fingerprint?
A non deterministic something can generate texts that are identified to be likely personal x - or not. What is imitation if you use auto generated content that is published somewhere somehow? Or others to imitate your style?
I think this is a party trick to scare people. Nothing else. For example image search is way more revealing even before AI.
If there is an uncertainty I would deflect my existence instead of fighting for it. Streisand effect in reverse.
The main problem are weirdos who stalk you or whatever to harm you and rely on AI.
I honestly find it stunning that people with higher education in science topics in just a year deleted everything they hopefully learned at university or school. I am disappointed and feel personally insulted whenever I hear “I asked AI”
Yesterday I talked to another member of Mensa and she is happy about AI so her book project now mustn’t be written by her but AI.
Is no one among us who knows how to do scientifically sound research? I spend countless hours at a copy machine to transfer book pages onto paper so that I could work through it without the book.
I think that it became to easy to draw conclusions based on AI. I worked for a professor and I advised her to not permit Wikipedia as source references back around 2010 because of being to easy. Meta sources vs originals.
We should all not worry about AI, because you prove nothing. There hasn’t been any anonymity at least for 20 years. It just depends on who can reliably identify you.
AI doesn’t. Deterministic behavior aka pattern do. Meta, Google, Apple etc. all know us. I am fine for advertising which is the proof on the one hand.
The only reason I would be worried is state controlled data. This is where the shit hits the fan. Chat control, EU cloud, no reliance on USA aka a prison which observes your every step.
So after a long hand written text: data is your currency. Don’t opt for anonymity but for freedom of choice and the right to be granted certain rights. The information part isn’t the problem, never was. The enforcement part is. And ads don’t do harm, oppression does.
And remember: oppression works best under any circumstances. Freedom is the only antipode there is.
In totalitarian regimes no AI was needed to stage a case against someone who wasn’t in favor of the leaders liking.
In short: freedom works despite no anonymity, oppression couldn’t care less.
And how about being automatically reported to the state for conducting such innocent prompting?
Do you know what saves you from state oppression? Publicity. Transparency doesn’t work with a no one.
We live in a Nietzsche like anti world to a certain extend. You hopefully choose the right thing to do. Or do you want to Streisand your anonymity?
That's my theory of what's to come, anyway.
People talk to these things not understanding the implications, and can get extremely personal. The model and companies behind it know who you are, you discuss details that reveal what you do, where you live, where you work, what you search for, and you probably signed in with an oauth provider like github or google, which is more than enough of a thread to start pulling on to learn more about you/link other things to you from on the open internet. It'll all get sucked up into the model and before you know it I'll be able to ask a model about my coworker (you) and get back answers from conversations you had with a model a year or two prior, exposing details about you that you might not want out there. And even if that isn't supposed to be allowed, how well has it worked out so far when it comes to data exfiltration and guardrails. If the model has info on you, being told not to share it won't protect you or that data.
Kelsey knows this:
To make sure it wasn’t somehow feeding my account information to Claude even in Incognito Mode, I asked a friend to run these tests on his computer, and he received the same result; I also got the same result when I tested it through the API.
When I tested this with my own writing several LessWrong commenters tested it with the snippets I provided (see comments) and saw that it could identify me: https://www.jefftk.com/p/automated-deanonymization-is-here
...
"The psychological mechanism is familiar by now: I encounter a task I perceive as difficult, I look for reasons the task cannot be done, I find or fabricate such a reason, I present it as a discovered constraint, and I propose an alternative that is easier."
- Opus 4.7 Max Thinking (clown emoji)
It's not bad at post mortem analysis of it's own mistakes but that will in no way prevent it from repeating the same mistake again instantly
While the points made are completely valid I want to point out that the statement of "Hey, by the way, first let me talk about my sexuality" lowers the quality of dialog a significant degree.
31 million people in America are gay. 71% of Americans support Gay Rights (more than any other political issue polled). It also quietly insinuates that only people with a certain minority lifestyle would care about privacy or that their privacy is somehow more important than others. It's not. Privacy is a universal right that's important to everyone.
How exactly does their post insinuate that? this comment is the "I don't even see color" as applied to internet privacy (with a touch of "just don't rub it in our faces")
Similar support for abortion being legal yet that was rolled back not too long ago.
Just because a topic has wide support doesn’t mean it’s not under attack and worth defending.
I don't know why you added statistics (you didn't really make a point with them?), but assuming you meant "gay people don't really need to worry", you actually bolstered the opposite argument. If only 71% of Americans support gay rights, that means 59 million people think the state should criminalize him. Try to put yourself in that position. 59 million people - you don't know who, but you know they probably live in your community - that don't want you to be able to get married, have a significant other, or have any PDA in media because it would "corrupt" kids. In 2016, 49 people were murdered in the Pulse Nightclub because they were gay. In 2020, a transgender woman was murdered because the murderer was afraid someone would think he was gay. Every year there are acts of violence against gay and trans people because of their sexuality. But nobody has ever been killed for being straight.
This idea that it is these men's "right" to disregard women's boundaries is ludicrous and it should be no surprise people don't agree with this.
Given that the author didn't say any of the things you claimed, and indeed said the opposite, it leads one to conclude you have a problem with the example used.
Per you, it surely must be important to fewer than 71% of Americans, no? The state of infringement on privacy seems to evidence that it's not so important to a lot of people such that they continue to be perfectly willing to elect and re-elect the politicians who enact the changes allowing infringing on it/fail to legislate in favor of privacy. Connecting it to an issue more people care about seems an attempt to argue for its important to those who otherwise are willing to look the other way.
FWIW, I fed my reply above into Claude and asked it to guess who wrote it. It refused (for safety) while also calling me out: "The style here (tight logical structure, the "per you" construction, the move of turning someone's own framing back on them) is common across a lot of contrarian-leaning commenters on HN"
That phrase is a dehumanizing, Nazi-style talking point: it frames a group of people as a “lifestyle” problem instead of as human beings, which is a common setup for stigma and persecution. Nazi ideology repeatedly used this kind of language to normalize hatred and make targeted groups seem unnatural or dangerous.
Calling people a “minority lifestyle” is not neutral wording; it reduces identity to something frivolous or deviant. Extremist movements have historically used similar framing to make prejudice sound reasonable and to recruit others into it.