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.
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.
7/10 times it’ll be flat out wrong
I can see a lot of false arrests coming from this. Like facial recognition does.
