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Comment by lmz | Hacker News Reader

> Model rewrites remove much of specific human dimension

Great. Isn't that part of being anonymous if one so desires? This would have decent potential to avoid stylometry deanonymization, no?

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Great? If you're worried that somebody's actively trying to identify your HN comments against some other source of your writing perhaps. But using a LLM to "avoid deanonymization" is about as sensible for some everyday Joe, as wearing a tinfoil hat in public to avoid 5G radiation is.

Yeah it's great if that's what you want to do. Whether it makes sense for any rando to do that is another question.

Whether it makes sense for anybody to do it is the real question. The threat model where this is a useful thing to do doesn't really exist in my opinion, at least not for obfuscating random comments. Perhaps if you're doing some anonymous journalism that's uncomfortable for your country's regime, and you've previously written other stuff using your real name, it might make sense to run your writing through a LLM, maybe. In addition to a bunch of other Snowden-esque countermeasures.

Don't you think that as LLMs get better the deanonimization attacks will get easier?

Also, a journalist in a hostile regime might be one example, but a user that posted _very_ personal things under an alt account is also another example, and I bet the latter is much more common than the former.

Do you have enemies that would be interested in spending real money trying to link your public accounts to some (possibly existing, likely not) alt accounts with "personal things"? I don't think that's very common.

And no, while I'm sure LLMs can be used for stylometry in academic exercises, I don't think they'll really enable any sort of automatic mass-deanonymization of random social media accounts. But who knows, the US government probably has a bunch of new PRISM-like programs going on already, so it might happen.

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