Will AI end anonymity?

Like many journalists, I have a bunch of unpublished fiction lying about, so I tried Claude on the first chapter of a romance novel that I started almost 20 years ago, during the hysterical, mawkish phase of a particularly bad breakup. “Megan McArdle,” said Opus 4.7, after a few seconds of thought. Fascinated, I kept feeding it smaller and smaller passages to see how little prose it needed for identification. The answer, apparently, was 1,441 words…

Would Claude do better or worse with something more modern? I fed Claude a different opening chapter from an unpublished science fiction novel I started right before the pandemic — I contain multitudes — and this time Claude needed only 1,132 words. The eulogy I gave for my mother, lightly edited to remove some too-specific biographical details, was even faster: Depending on the passage, Claude was able to peg me as the author in as few as 124 words.

Here is more from Megan McArdle.