Opus 4.7 knows the real Kelsey

> But it can get uncannily far. I asked a close friend who doesn’t have public social media accounts or much writing online for permission to test some things she had said in a Discord channel. Asked to guess the author, Claude 4.7 failed — but it guessed two other people who were in that channel and who are close friends of hers (me and another person who has an internet presence).

Is this "uncannily far"? Another read is that it loves guessing Kelsey Piper.

A moderately well-known physicist and I talked about this a few years ago. He had been given access to the raw (non-instruct) version of GPT 4 as an early tester.

He explained that when he fed it snippets of the beginning of text, it would complete it in his voice and then sign it with his name.

I think this has been true for a while, probably diminished a little bit by the Instruct post training, and would presumably vary by degree as the size of the pretrain.

On some level it would make sense for LLMs to be inherently good at stylometry, but apparently no model before Opus 4.7 could do this. And the one stylometric task that has been tried over and over with little reliability (here's some text, is this LLM generated?) is much simpler than identifying a specific blogger or a member of a small discord community. Not sure what to make of this.

> That includes gay people like me, who could hardly have admitted under our names to how we lived our lives for most of America’s history, as well as many other groups with minoritarian lifestyles

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.

Someone ought to try feeding the BTC whitepaper in and share what comes out

The joke's on you all for willingly posting this content online for it to later be harvested by AI.

Nobody is forcing you to use these systems. The hackers have always said this moment, or something like it, would come, from beneath their canopies of tin foil. I've posted almost nothing online - not under pseudonyms nor real names - for over a decade. I sat on this HN username for almost 12 years before making a single post - and now HN forms the overwhelming majority of my port 443 footprint, where I state up front that everything is now associated to my real name.

Complete magick is possible when you simply refuse to participate in the things that society has tacitly assumed everybody does.

One should assume that models will be good enough in the nearish future that privacy will be a thing of the past. Every anonymous post you made online can be traced back to you. However at that point AI will be good enough at fabrication that nobody will believe anything.

I just fed it my latest blog post draft, and it got it in one. Even knowing what to expect, I was very surprised!

Hm, that’s a multinomial classification with a very high cardinality. It’s really weird it works. I’m sure it does as the author states, but for how many authors (out of the whole web) does this work?

I tried the four pieces of text with Opus 4.7 (in incognito) and it guessed correctly for two of them, and I made sure to specify no web search and the model seems to have obeyed my instructions with that.

Although this is just a single piece of text from a prolific writer, it'll go much further with deanonymizing anyone when combining multiple pieces of text plus other contextual information about the writer that might give away their age range, location, and occupation.

Man, the day we get Satoshi Nakomoto out will be the day we must bow to our privacy destroying overlords. For the moment, they can’t tell me from my posts: unknown rando that I am.

Oops, accidental superstylometry.

The author mentions that she tried to get an explanation for how the models identified her and got nonsense, but I'd be curious what the CoT looked like. Surely that'd be a little more accurate in showing how the LLM arrived as its conclusion, rather than asking it after-the-fact.

Can't wait to have to exchange stylometric encoders with my loved ones so that we can exchange truly private messages without losing our human touch.

It's hard to tell if that's what's going on here, but it seems pretty clear this ability and more like it will be quite apparent in the future.

I have seen some poorly considered projections of what the world might look like when this happens. Usually by assuming bad actors will use the abilities and we will be powerless.

Except I don't think that is true.

Imagine if we had a world where nobody had the ability to keep a secret of any sort. Any action that a bad actor might perform would be revealed because they couldn't do it secretly.

You could browse your ex-girlfriend's email, but at the cost of everyone knowing you did it.

I don't really know how humans as a society would react to a situation like that. You don't have to go snooping for muck, so perhaps the inability to do so secretly would mean people go about their lives without snooping.

I could imagine both good and terrible outcomes.

Is Kelsey Piper a celebrity writer? She may be in a different class.

Could this be just memory? Not clear it actually isn’t

Always send your public posts through a local LLM to de-style you.

[flagged]

"The pattern is: user says X, I do Y where Y is a less-effortful approximation of X, then I present Y as if it were X or as a "first step toward" X."

...

"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

[dead]

Maybe it’s time to start running a local model with a browser extension to defend against this type of stuff.

Remember how the TrueCrypt project shut down shortly before a join goverment/university paper was released about code stylometry? I guess LLMs will be employed as a defence against that type of thing.