I feel like with the rise of AI something that anonymizes writing styles should exist. For example it could look for differences in American versus British spelling like color versus colour or contextual things like soccer versus football and make edits accordingly. ChatGPT could be fed a prompt that says “Rewrite the following paragraphs as if they were written by an Australian” but I don’t know if it would have a good enough grasp on the objective or if it would start shoehorning in references to koalas and fairy floss.

I tried searching online to see if something like this existed and found a few articles from around the 2010s such as Software Helps Identify Anonymous Writers or Helps Them Stay That Way by the New York Times. It talks about stylometry and Anonymouth but it seems like Anonymouth hasn’t been updated in years. All recent articles seem to be about plagiarism and AI.

For context what got me thinking about the topic was remembering JK Rowling being revealed to be the author of a mystery novel called The Cuckoo’s Calling. Smithsonian wrote an article about it called How Did Computers Uncover J.K. Rowling’s Pseudonym?. I thought it could make for a neat post here.

  • Corroded@leminal.spaceOPEnglish
    4·
    9 months ago

    Changing dialect may be too small of a change. But if you could say write this like 1-2 generations younger/older using high school slang of the time you might get a useful difference.

    I feel like knowing the correct use of slang for a demographic would be a challenge and require a lot of constant research. Even if someone was to go off of slang younger people were using I feel like there’s a risk of it being a regional term.

    Trying to force it I’d probably end up with something like “Those elf bars be dripping but that extra popcorn lung was a vibe check on god” which gives off “How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?” vibes.