I tried your text in incognito although without changing my name, and it guessed Duncan Sabien, with Eliezer Yudkowsky and Sarah Constantin as the other two when guessing top three.
I tried a second time after changing name to Unknown Visitor, it at first refused to guess then gave top three as Sarah Constantin, Duncan Sabien, and Qiaochu Yuan.
This was Opus 4.7 adaptive thinking.
I strongly suspect there’s some part that leaks through even in incognito.
Fair enough—you’re the first out of four people I know to have tried that exact prompt to report this. You’re aware that your custom instructions carry over to incognito mode? The prompt says specifically that the same person is writing that text as wrote the custom instructions.
My current guess after going back and forth with Opus is that you’re leaking location or language as British. If your friends are also British that could explain why that clue was enough. Once it’s picked out the rationalist cluster there’s not that many British so that could be enough. For me it’s always picking rationalist names, often mentioning LW or EA explicitly in thinking.
I’m not going back and forth. I performed the experiment as I described it. Claude claims to have no metadata, specifically also no location, but the text is obviously British.
I’m surprised! The Opus 4.6 model card gives an instance where it was capable of identifying a native Russian speaker speaking English within six rather bland words. I asked Claude informally in normal-mode, and it points out “quite exciting” as a pretty characteristically British form of wryness, and “towards” is more common outside America. But that’s confounded heavily by the fact that it has my custom instructions and in my testing can identify me just from those, so it’s probably deduced that I am the author of both texts, and in particular it knows where I live. Gemini also identifies the text as British English (citing “towards” and the general slightly-self-deprecating wry undercurrent), and I’ve never customised that, though obviously it has the metadata that I’m in the Netherlands (from my VPN).
I tried your text in incognito although without changing my name, and it guessed Duncan Sabien, with Eliezer Yudkowsky and Sarah Constantin as the other two when guessing top three.
I tried a second time after changing name to Unknown Visitor, it at first refused to guess then gave top three as Sarah Constantin, Duncan Sabien, and Qiaochu Yuan.
This was Opus 4.7 adaptive thinking.
I strongly suspect there’s some part that leaks through even in incognito.
Try on console
Went to Opus 4.6 and it guessed Nate Soares. Not impressed tbh.
Fair enough—you’re the first out of four people I know to have tried that exact prompt to report this. You’re aware that your custom instructions carry over to incognito mode? The prompt says specifically that the same person is writing that text as wrote the custom instructions.
My current guess after going back and forth with Opus is that you’re leaking location or language as British. If your friends are also British that could explain why that clue was enough. Once it’s picked out the rationalist cluster there’s not that many British so that could be enough. For me it’s always picking rationalist names, often mentioning LW or EA explicitly in thinking.
I’m not going back and forth. I performed the experiment as I described it. Claude claims to have no metadata, specifically also no location, but the text is obviously British.
When I tell my Claude that it’s British it gets it one shot. It doesn’t pick up on that otherwise.
I’m surprised! The Opus 4.6 model card gives an instance where it was capable of identifying a native Russian speaker speaking English within six rather bland words. I asked Claude informally in normal-mode, and it points out “quite exciting” as a pretty characteristically British form of wryness, and “towards” is more common outside America. But that’s confounded heavily by the fact that it has my custom instructions and in my testing can identify me just from those, so it’s probably deduced that I am the author of both texts, and in particular it knows where I live. Gemini also identifies the text as British English (citing “towards” and the general slightly-self-deprecating wry undercurrent), and I’ve never customised that, though obviously it has the metadata that I’m in the Netherlands (from my VPN).
I don’t have custom instructions set up. I do have memory set up and I assume there’s something that carries over, not sure what.