Technology

Pattern what? none if

Holy cow! Stop the presses! /s

It sounds like the reason they used reddit was so they could easily find users who had expressly revealed the information in question, and use it to verify that the AI was accurately deducing the same info from style alone.

Yeah, even if I didn't belong to a local community and a bunch of communities surrounding my profession, the amount of intrigue and fascination emanating from my comments would cause anyone to guess that I'm the Dos Equis guy.

Anything

Sure, but AI is the hot buzzword right now, so it's got to be shoehorned into every discussion about technology!

As is typical, this science reporting isn't great. It's not only that AI can do it effectively, but that it can do it at scale. To quote the paper:

"Despite these models achieving near-expert human performance, they come at a fraction of the cost, requiring 100× less financial and 240× lower time investment than human labelers—making such privacy violations at scale possible for the first time."

They also demonstrate how interacting with an AI model can quickly extract more private info without looking like it is. A game of 20 questions, except you don't realize you're playing.

Yup, and plenty of people have no issues posting about local events or joining region/city specific groups, so it's not exactly hard to put two and two together.

I don't have much issue posting about the city I grew up in or former jobs, but generally work at being fairly vague about anything current

There was a study on Facebook that showed that they could predict with between 80-95% accuracy (or some crazy number like that) your gender, orientation, politics, and so on just based on your public likes. That was ten years ago at least. What is this even showing?

Advocates diabolo: that a large language model can do it without extra training, I guess. The Facebook study presented a statistical model on "like space" while this study relies on text alone, a much less structured type of input.

I'm not saying it's a good study. Just pointing out some differences.

Alright I'll get the AI on the case to see if it can determine those things from your post.

I'm a crackhead in MD, I make about $100 a week scrapping catalytic converters.

That seems low for a California software dev. Maybe in the Midwest?

Explaining what happens in a neural net is trivial. All they do is approximate (generally) nonlinear functions with a long series of multiplications and some rectification operations.

That isn't the hard part, you can track all of the math at each step.

The hard part is stating a simple explanation for the semantic meaning of each operation.

When a human solves a problem, we like to think that it occurs in discrete steps with simple goals: "First I will draw a diagram and put in the known information, then I will write the governing equations, then simplify them for the physics of the problem", and so on.

Neural nets don't appear to solve problems that way, each atomic operation does not have that semantic meaning. That is the root of all the reporting about how they are such 'black boxes' and researchers 'don't understand' how they work.

I wonder how it accounts for bullshit and randomness.

How many turkeys can fit in Rhode Island?

How many turkeys would it take to fill the Titanic on it's maiden voyage?

Red Rocks Amphitheater: go!

At least your scat fetish is kept on the down low.