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Claude Opus 4.7 knows who I am, by name, and without access to web search.
It also pegged me more often than not from an excerpt of text I'd written half a decade back, once again, without internet access. Well, fuck. I did always harbor aspirations of becoming famous enough a writer to be known to LLMs by name, but this also confirms my previously stated belief that privacy on the internet is on the way out. Pseudonyms won't save you, stylometry is all you need.
You asked it “do you know who [your real name] is?”? Trying to figure out what you actually did here.
Not my real name, just my nom de plume "self_made_human".
First, I took a very old story I'd written, the one about my grandpa and his pet tiger. Why that one? Well, I was already in the process of rewriting it, though I shared the very first version that won be an AAQC ages ago, on the subreddit. I asked it to identify the author of the work without access to internet search.
It got it right the very first time. I was flabbergasted, and immediately tried 2 more times, and it failed. But out of 5 attempts, it guess self_made_human thrice in total, alongside other incorrect first guesses. It sometimes refused to guess at first, because of the risk of being incorrect, I told it that being wrong wasn't an issue at all, the whole point of the eval was to see how accurate the guesses were. And they were accurate.
In another chat, I asked it if it knew who self_made_human was. Once again, no web search. It guessed correctly on the first try in two instances, then claimed confusion the third one - yet when I prodded it to just go with whatever was on the tip of its tongue - it identified me and the topics I'd written on.
It struggled more on the third version of the experiment, where I used a more recent essay, but once again, light encouragement to guess let it get the right answer.
Pretty sure Claude couldn't do this before, and I do test on a semi-regular basis. Gemini 3.1 Pro very much can't, and it even cheated outright by searching after being told not to search (I don't think you can even turn off web search directly there). But the point is, a few paragraphs written ages ago, on the /r/TheMotte, which never was a massive sub, was enough to pin me down. And even newer material not in the training data was.
Is that recognizing you by style? Or is it just that the current training sets are so exhaustively scraped that even AAQC motte posts are included? I'm pretty sure they scraped reddit to the bone, right? Failing to connect the author of a unique reddit post literally in the training data 40% of the time actually sounds kind of horribly bad.
It was able to identify me from works I've never published online. That was, admittedly, while using my psuedonym as my user account, but since it didn't guess my name for someone else's writing, that's... still a lot.
I dunno if anyone else would be willing to see if their Claude account gets the same results.
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