4 ms·

Correct -- it can identify one of your (current) voices, written with your knowledge that the text will be used for the purpose of having an LLM determine wheth

by runako 2mo ago

Correct -- it can identify one of your (current) voices, written with your knowledge that the text will be used for the purpose of having an LLM determine whether you wrote it. This is a mentalist setup. Expanding on that...you are fully capable of writing e.g. product instructions, or marketing copy, or religious verse, or a poem, or a fictional quote from a fictional character in your upcoming novel. I would consider it unlikely that any LLM could identify you as the writer of any of those (though Claude might infer it was you given your chat history). The point is that Pangram claims to be able to do exactly that! Pangram is also making the claim that they can, to a high degree of certainty, identify when someone else wrote text and claimed it to be yours. This, when Pangram has not ever seen a writing sample of either writer. This is quite obviously ridiculous!

Smaug123 2mo ago
> written with your knowledge that the text will be used for the purpose of having an LLM determine whether you wrote it Actually no. I've done the experiment under those conditions, of course, but I've also out of mere interest just shoved some text in after the fact (most recently, to see whether Claude would de-anonymise the first two paragraphs of my answer to a questionnaire out of the box - it did). "Quite obviously ridiculous" I simply disagree with. My compendium of Sherlock Holmes stories came with a book at the end, "The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes", which was century-old fanfiction, containing stories written by people trying to write Arthur Conan Doyle writing Sherlock Holmes, and it was clearly not him. I really think you massively underestimate just how many bits of information are contained in a paragraph of text!
- runako 2mo ago
  The Holmes example is off-base as you had quite obviously been exposed to Holmes (e.g. it was in your training data). Pangram is asserting they don't need that to identify an individual. An individual who may still be learning and developing their writing style/voice, etc. Put this in the mentalist bucket. Sure, for parlor tricks like you describe, it can be entertaining because the stakes are low and we accept the error rate. Should you discipline a student solely on the basis of Pangram output (which is happening in the real world)? Absolutely not.

by runako 2mo ago

Smaug123 2mo ago

> written with your knowledge that the text will be used for the purpose of having an LLM determine whether you wrote it Actually no. I've done the experiment under those conditions, of course, but I've also out of mere interest just shoved some text in after the fact (most recently, to see whether Claude would de-anonymise the first two paragraphs of my answer to a questionnaire out of the box - it did). "Quite obviously ridiculous" I simply disagree with. My compendium of Sherlock Holmes stories came with a book at the end, "The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes", which was century-old fanfiction, containing stories written by people trying to write Arthur Conan Doyle writing Sherlock Holmes, and it was clearly not him. I really think you massively underestimate just how many bits of information are contained in a paragraph of text!

runako 2mo ago
The Holmes example is off-base as you had quite obviously been exposed to Holmes (e.g. it was in your training data). Pangram is asserting they don't need that to identify an individual. An individual who may still be learning and developing their writing style/voice, etc. Put this in the mentalist bucket. Sure, for parlor tricks like you describe, it can be entertaining because the stakes are low and we accept the error rate. Should you discipline a student solely on the basis of Pangram output (which is happening in the real world)? Absolutely not.