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.
alt-text
(Two screenshots side-by-side showing a text converter with the following input, settings, output + new settings and new output)
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
Make my text:
More professional
Available for purchase: a pair of infant footwear, never utilized.
Make my text:
More sociable (waffle)
Hey there! So I’ve got these super cute baby shoes up for grabs. Unfortunately, they’ve never been worn. But that just means they’re brand spanking new and ready for a little one to rock them! Let me know if you’re interested in giving these adorable kicks a new home. #forsale #babystyle #neverworn