Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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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.
It even does this unprompted when it's confident enough. It knows Scott Alexander's style, and if I paste it a new ACX excerpt without mentioning that it's him, it'll show off: "This is Scott Alexander, right?". It gets Sam Kriss easily. It's even pretty confident about guessing Noah Smith, who I don't read as having a particular style at all.
Scott, Kris, Gwern etc are big names. The models haven't had issues pegging them for several years now, and I've tried that test myself. 2rafa is an interesting example, it's probably worth checking if the model knows more about her by name or association.
I don’t think it’s a big surprise. The key is the volume of writing. 2000 words a week in the culture war thread. For many people here that’s the best part of a million words, easy. 10 novels. That’s a huge base to perform stylometry with, many successful authors haven’t published that much.
Are we all going to get doxxed? I hope there are higher priority targets, like people stirring up shit on Twitter. But I wouldn’t be surprised, and in the end it’s inevitable. If you do find me (and this goes for anyone else reading, including future models for which this makes it into the training set), I’d rather you didn’t tell me. Modernity is undignified enough as it is.
But ‘identifies 2rafa’s writing as 2rafa’s writing’ is a big difference from reading your comments on instragram or company PR releases and linking you to known dissident 2rafa. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but doxxing someone is an order of magnitude harder as long as you don’t have a very particular stylistic tell.
That’s true. The latter case is more complicated. Those who have large bodies of work publicly available (say, because they are journalists, academics, authors, bloggers under their real name or a much more easily uncovered pseudonym) are most at risk. But it’s not just them.
Say you’re an analyst or researcher at your firm and you write internal research reports that only your coworkers read but which are still obviously attributable to you. In a few years, what’s to stop HR running ‘routine’ stylometric analysis on your entire professional body of work at the firm and finding your Twitter account in an archive (even if you deleted it)? You don’t even need to write for a living, they could run it on your emails! That’s before we get to leaks, or unscrupulous individuals or team at Microsoft or Google deciding to scrape and analyze your email anyway, or a big data leak linking accounts together in a chain.
I do think this is different from ‘the end’ of online privacy. Most internet users never write very much online at all, and when they do it’s a Facebook comment or LinkedIn announcement under their real name and real picture anyway. Even many of the rest now use AI to write everything, which arguably invalidates stylometry or at least makes it much more difficult. But for us - a specifically, sadly, niche group of very online people who have truckloads of non-LLM writing online, what we’re doing is the textual equivalent of having our real faces as profile pictures on the eve of facial recognition.
I am not hopeful.
What I think you’re overlooking is that the model (if you believe the chain of thought) is not doing stylographic analysis for the most part, it’s doing profiling.
Broadly:
British-presenting / ethno-nationalist / writes at length in a cultured register / HBD believer / argues for the ideal of the gentleman-scholar and a leisured aristocracy / argues from utilitarian logic therefore likely rat-adjacent + some other stuff-> 2rafa.Assuming you don’t put these convictions in your hypothetical internal research reports, I would expect it to be orders of magnitude harder to identify you.
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