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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.

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[-] Bluegrass_Addict@lemmy.ca 18 points 3 days ago

7/10 times it'll be flat out wrong

[-] Thedogdrinkscoffee@lemmy.ca 16 points 3 days ago

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

[-] zebidiah@lemmy.ca 7 points 3 days ago

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"

[-] Sims@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 days ago

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

[-] kbal@fedia.io 6 points 3 days ago

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.

[-] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 7 points 3 days ago

Most websites provide cookies for free.

[-] Tolookah@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 3 days ago

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

[-] kbal@fedia.io 3 points 2 days ago

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.

[-] DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 2 points 2 days ago

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

this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2026
39 points (100.0% liked)

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