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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24429 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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It didn't know I was the one who submitted it, given that I stripped out all my personalization details and ensured memory was still off. Believe me, I know how to check for unwarranted sycophancy.

"They know." Do you really think you can stay anonymous on the Internet these days? There are enough server-side stored browser fingerprints to peg you as SMH even if you switch incognito mode on.

I'd invite evidence to suggest that Anthropic in particular is doing this, and that that kind of information is then shared with any given instance of Claude itself. It's not. This isn't a generic internet privacy (or lack thereof) argument.

The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. I can only extrapolate from every other website in existence that asks me if I want to share my data with their 587 partners, including 231 "legitimate interest" ones. And LLM vendors fingerprint your browser much more extensively than anyone else, because they want to identify and block APIs running headless or even headed browsers.

The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.

Please sir, I'm a Bayesian.

It's trickier then you'd think, particularly if you're using Apple hardware.

The person most likely to submit it is still you. It's the same principle behind an egosearch.

If I am an AI, and someone asks me to identify the author of a random internet comment, my prior is at least 50% that the person asking is the author.

You'd want to look closer at the specific prompt/request I use for this. Saying "oh, you're the writer" is not an acceptable answer. On the occasions Claude says something like that, my next move is to ask it to specify a name.

It would be like someone suspecting their boyfriend has a side-ho, texting them from an unknown number and going "what's my name darling? If you're not talking to other women, then that should be an easy answer".

A reply that says "oh, it's you! The only beautiful lady in my life" will receive a predictably cool reaction.

It goes without saying that I don't put "I'm self_made_human" in my personalization settings. I keep memory off. I've also explitly tried this without any user personalization at all, and Opus 4.7 reliably identifies me >50% of the time from samples longer than 2-3 paragraphs, including excerpts written well after the knowledge cutoff (such as the example above, which couldn't be in its training corpus for the simple reason that it hadn't even been posted online, yet).

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