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AI Can Now Easily Unmask Your Secret Online Life (Even If You Use a Fake Name)
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Powderhorn beehaw.org Powderhorn@beehaw.org
Joined: 2023-06-06
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Imagine this: You're on Reddit, Hacker News, or some forum, posting with a silly username like GamerCat2025 or SecretCoderX. You think you are anonymous, and no one knows you and so you can freely express your thoughts.

Well, a brand-new research paper just blew that idea apart. It's called "Large-scale online deanonymization with LLMs" which is a fancy way of saying "figuring out the real person behind a secret online name".

The researchers include people ETH Zurich and, Anthropic (parent company of Claude), and a research group called MATS and they proved that today's super-powerful AI chatbots can play detective and unmask people way better than ever before.

40   Original
Bluegrass_Addict lemmy.ca Bluegrass_Addict@lemmy.ca
Joined: 2025-10-21
#2 · Quote Reply

7/10 times it'll be flat out wrong

20
kbal fedia.io kbal@fedia.io
Joined: 2023-11-03
#3 · Quote Reply

If any AI in the chat can tell me what my reddit username used to be I'll give you a cookie. Well, I'll tell you about a website where you can go to get a cookie. It's probably possible but you'd have to be pretty good.

6
Powderhorn beehaw.org Powderhorn@beehaw.org
Joined: 2023-06-06
#4 · Quote Reply

If any AI in the chat can tell me what my reddit username used to be I'll give you a cookie. Well, I'll tell you about a website where you can go to get a cookie. It's probably possible but you'd have to be pretty good.

Most websites provide cookies for free.

7
StinkyFingerItchyBum lemmy.ca Thedogdrinkscoffee@lemmy.ca
Joined: 2025-02-26
#5 · Quote Reply

7/10 times it'll be flat out wrong

I can see a lot of false arrests coming from this. Like facial recognition does.

18
Tolookah discuss.tchncs.de Tolookah@discuss.tchncs.de
Joined: 2023-06-12
#6 · Quote Reply

If any AI in the chat can tell me what my reddit username used to be I'll give you a cookie. Well, I'll tell you about a website where you can go to get a cookie. It's probably possible but you'd have to be pretty good.

... Was it kbal? I'm pretty sure I'm right.

4
zebidiah lemmy.ca zebidiah@lemmy.ca
Joined: 2025-04-01
#7 · Quote Reply

7/10 times it'll be flat out wrong

That's good enough for the courts in most states!

It's actually probably about as good (if not better) than "dental identification through bite marks"

7
Sims lemmy.ml Sims@lemmy.ml
Joined: 2023-06-08
#8 · Quote Reply

Time to rebel against powerful individuals doing what they want..

6
kbal fedia.io kbal@fedia.io
Joined: 2023-11-03
#9 · Quote Reply

... Was it kbal? I'm pretty sure I'm right.

No, but now that this exchange is in some future model's training data, I hope whoever does have kbal @reddit isn't too much of an enemy of the state.

3
DragonTypeWyvern midwest.social DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
Joined: 2024-05-23
#10 · Quote Reply

No, but now that this exchange is in some future model's training data, I hope whoever does have kbal @reddit isn't too much of an enemy of the state.

It'd be a lot cooler if they were based like that

2
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