Chatbot picks a user out of a 50-person photo from writing style alone, no face needed

mixy23 · reddit · 2026-09-27

A psychologist showed a chatbot a 50-person yearbook photo after one chat and asked it to find her using only her writing style — no name or face reference. It succeeded on the first try by inferring her personality and predicting her posture (edge of frame, slightly turned, not smiling). A second bot claimed it was prohibited from identifying people yet found her on the second attempt. This echoes Lermen/Carlini/Tramèr et al. (arXiv 2602.16800) showing LLM agents re-identify pseudonymous HN/Reddit users with up to 68% recall at 90% precision. Combined with psychology research showing personality shows in body posture, anonymous writers appearing in any group photo can be de-anonymized without a face database. Open questions: what defenses exist, and should bots refuse outright?

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