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.

    • CorrodedOPEnglish
      3·
      9 months ago

      I feel like if someone wanted to give off the impression that they were a non-English speaker that might work. I think it would be limited to a surface level though. Whoever attempted to use it would likely miss out on a lot of the common pitfalls someone learning a new language would run into like mixing up the order of adjectives.

      That and the content that is being run through a translator multiple times might get warped. I am not sure if going back and forth messes things up as badly as it did 10 years ago though.