anonymity anxiety
Of all the multitudes of feelings I have about LLMs and how they are affecting my life, the thing that really got me anxious was this:
https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/i-can-never-talk-to-an-ai-anonymously
The whole point of this blog is anonymity. I made it for creative expression and to express myself more authentically, not having to worry about what my colleagues or friends would think for example.
I worry about the future as well. I'm worried that my views online (on LLMs for example) might affect my job prospects in the future, because an LLM can determine that I've written stuff that I posted anonymously. I don't know what's going to happen to the software engineer job market, but if it does collapse, should I be thinking about what I'm saying in that context, even anonymously?
In this age, it feels like an act of defiance to mention any downsides of LLM usage. What if my applications are rejected (or worse, I'm made redundant) because I'm 'not pro-AI enough'?
The suggested way to combat this is to feed everything you write through an LLM to anonymize it. That's not just depressing - it's a battle for the soul of the web. (ha ha)
There's not an awful lot of writing under my real name publicly online, so maybe I don't need to worry. But who knows if one day one of the companies I worked for kicks the bucket and sells off their internal chat history for LLM training?
Mixed up in all of this as well - am I being a coward? There's plenty of blogs out there with much more extreme views on LLMs than mine under real names. I'm worried about writing even this post under a pseudonym. Perhaps I should be expressing myself publicly and to hell with the consequences.
But then, I have a family to provide for. I'm even thinking twice whether to mention that here as it makes me more identifiable.
After thinking on it for a couple of weeks, I've decided to just continue writing anyway. And I'm never anonymizing my writing using an LLM. I'm choosing to hope that I'm overreacting to this.