‘Find My Secret Document’: Ethereum Co-Founder Buterin Puts AI to Test

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has announced a unique experiment that is supposed to test the limits of artificial intelligence and privacy.

Buterin has dared the internet to unmask an anonymous document he authored with the help of any AI tool at their disposal.

Buterin’s secret document

Buterin aims to test the recent claims that AI-driven writing-style analysis could make online anonymity pretty much impossible, which has become the most recent scare linked to the newfangled technology.

Buterin revealed that he authored an anonymous document related to Ethereum that was published sometime between 2020 and 2026.

The text is of “moderate importance.” He has estimated that it ranks among 200 to 2,000 Ethereum-related publications of similar or greater importance.

Buterin stated he was willing to “cannibalize” a piece of his own anonymity to pull off the rather ambitious experiment.

At press time, no one has publicly confirmed a successful identification of the document.

Could AI end anonymity?

Stylometry, the statistical analysis of a person’s linguistic style, has been used for decades for resolving authorship disputes or other purposes. It would typically require very vigorous manual analysis, which was extremely labor-intensive.

However, with the advent of highly advanced generative AI, stylometry has become way more efficient. These models are capable of deciphering an author’s unique writing style in mere seconds.

Buterin, a prolific writer, has an extensive corpus of publicly available writing (blog posts, Ethereum Improvement Proposals, research papers, forum comments, social media posts, and so on).

If AI does manage to successfully identify Buterin’s anonymous work, it could raise massive alarms regarding privacy. Conversely, if AI fails to find the document, it will show that pseudonymous contributions may still be secure despite the massive progress of AI.