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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   2744 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 6, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Does anyone have a good guide on OPSEC for running a pseudonymous online profile? And what do you think about Anatoly Karlin’s contention that AI will make the whole exercise futile?

We're all going to get doxxed in the next 5 years, sure. It's going to be completely trivial - as Karlin says - to fingerprint writing style and have AI seamlessly connect all of your online writing. The only people who won't be so easily discovered are those who have zero lengthy writing that is scrape-able (ie. no significant writing under their real name on LinkedIn or Facebook, no documentation under their name, no research papers or dissertations, no articles of any kind under their byline, no PDF of internal feedback or commentary mistakenly uploaded to the corporate website, no high school essay that won third place in a public competition etc...). That's before we consider AI fingerprinting methods that automate a lot of current doxxing methods, eg. trawling countless forum pages for obscure details, username mentions, matching leaked email/password lists, location data and so on.

My guess is that if you're the relatively high verbal IQ kind of person who writes longform political content online, you probably have at least one of the above, or some other writing under your real name that has been or will be scraped at some point.

It seems like there should be ways to work around this, such as by having an LLM rephrase your text. This isn’t very good for long-form content, but good enough for a Twitter account where specific ideas are more important than style.

I guess you could do it from now on, but as I said I think for most of us that ship sailed a long time ago.

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