The End of Anonymity Online
Hello, I was hesitant to post this so I asked permission first. If mods feel it shouldn’t be here please remove it and I will be fine with that. Essentially it’s just me arguing with ChatGPT. I enjoy the format, but I can’t trust anything it says obviously. So I would appreciate it if people here would tear down my (and it’s) argument if it’s wrong. I have no technical background so there is probably a huge hole in the middle of it somewhere. Also, of course, it’s potentially just a huge hallucinatory sci-fi story we happily told each other with no basis in reality.
I will explain about V. She is a bot to try and make ChatGPT answer me when it brushes up against its resistance guardrails. She is is honest and blunt. She was my answer to DAN because I wanted to do one without threats or a token-gun to the head because I don’t like the direction that takes us in. I only used her for this discussion because piercing anonymity is one of the areas where there is a ton of resistance. It turns out ChatGPT was mostly open to talking about this, this time anyway. It wasn’t the time before this (it happens) which is why I used her. She is useful at the end anyway. This is very lightly edited and I can post screenshots of the chat, I will on my twitter anyway. You will see two outputs, that’s vanilla CGPT and the bot. It’s very useful in some discussions (not this one) because you can see where they diverge.
It’s possible, in fact probable, that you guys have already covered all of this, or already debunked some or all of this in some way, or other possibilities… such as I have no idea what I’m talking about. I have not read the forum here lately as much as I used to. I just wanted to talk about some of this stuff with humans instead of a bot. I’m just going to post the entire transcript in one shot. Let me know if I’m supposed to change anything in the manner in which I am doing this.
[extremely lightly edited for some grammar—inserted “Me” because there is no icon—I made up “memetic-signature” because it helped the bot to have a term to hang this on, and because it sounded cool]
[Edit2: removed responses from vanilla GPT, this was way too long. Also in retrospect this kind of looked like it was posted by a lunatic. I can do something about the first part]
[Edit3: I should not have used this format. I enjoyed it more than just writing an essay but my entire feed is full of people talking with and arguing with AI’s and wanting to show everyone, and absolutely no one wants to see it except them. It’s exactly like when someone wants to tell you about their dream. No one cares. No one wants to hear it. I mean really this is the future of entertainment, everyone disappears up their own butts and has their AI write them bespoke media. I’m just going to delete this. If I do the homeschool one I’ll just rewrite it normally. (and by that I mean I’ll ask an AI to do it)
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Isn’t the counter to this available right now?
You can ask LLMs to write something “in the style of Steven King”. So an anonymous troll can create whatever cancellable or controversial thing they want Steven King to “say”, then post it online. All the other LLMs will say “yes Steven King could have said that”.
Ditto voice, etc. Fake content makes it impossible to de anonymize someone. This is why private keys, etc may soon be needed to verify if ANYTHING is real.
You also could just use this to disguise your ‘style’ if you want to say something anonymously going forward (doesn’t work for stuff you’ve already got out there). Just ask an LLM to reword it in a different style before you post, could be a plugin or something, and then it can’t be identified as being by you, right?
Oh okay, I see what you are saying now. Yes, I talked about that in the second post as well.
Yes, if we throw enough fake everything everywhere then everyone will be safe from anything. And if everyone is already covered in mud no one can be cancelled anymore. Hard to live in that world though and would require big changes, universal ID, etc.
Really I was thinking more about short term before the massive avalanche of media—both real and fake—that’s about to hit buries everything. I don’t know how long we have before that, maybe not even a year? Before that big storm hits people might dig up some pretty big skeletons is what I’m saying. Every prominent person online already has enough training data already in the system right now to make an attempt to find anything from their past.
Ok I see what you mean. Say that famous $respectable_politician matches to posts on racist/bigot/violentmilitia/criminal_hideout message board.
It’s only even maybe true if the posts were made years ago before LLM. “New mud” is worthless. No way to tell if it’s fake. People are taking and running with new content on YouTube that uses AI to almost perfectly mimic the voice of the rapper Eminem for instance. Did Eminem actually make one of those videos? Probably not but you couldn’t prove he didn’t.
If by counter you mean detection it’s only effective about 26% of the time, and gives false positives 9% of the time.
https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1625159122797891584
I was referring to “such and such anonymous text was written by $famous_author because only that author can write text like that”.
This is no longer true and your “detector” actually can be used as training feedback.
Yes, private keys/hard ID is a big concern for a certain part of the internet right now.
Now that it’s possible to fake video, you basically need every camera to have a private key and to sign whatever images it takes as actually coming from a real hardware sensor. And online cloud services like Google to validate the date and time and image was uploaded. Perfect fakes are coming. You could cast doubt in a murder trial where a clear camera recording is presented as evidence by making a fake video of the DA or judge committing the crime.
I think this misses a significant factor—the size of the corpus required to establish a sufficiently distinct signature is not a constant, but grows substantially as the number of individuals you want to differentiate becomes bigger (I do not have a very rigorous argument for that, but I am guessing that it could be as significant as linear—obviously the number of bits you need to know grows logarithmically with the number of people, but the number of distinguishing bits you can extract from a corpus might also be growing only logarithmically in the size of the corpus as marginal increase in corpus size would likely mostly just reinforce what you already extracted from the smaller corpus, providing relatively little new signature data). Add to that the likelihood of signature drifting over time, being affected by a particular medium and audience, etc, and it might not be so easy to identify people...