Vitalik issues a challenge to AI: identify his anonymous Ethereum document using a writing style approach

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin posted on the X platform on the 23rd, issuing a public challenge to AI. He revealed that earlier this year, under an anonymous identity, he wrote an important Ethereum document, and invited the community and AI tools to identify it among hundreds of documents by analyzing writing style, testing whether online anonymity is breaking down.
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• Challenges of AI de-anonymization experiments
• The scale of Ethereum ecosystem documents
• The significance for anonymous culture

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin spoke out on the X platform on the 23rd, publicly challenging AI. He disclosed that earlier this year, he wrote a "moderately important" public document about Ethereum under an anonymous identity, and invited the community and AI tools to find it among 200 to 2000 Ethereum documents.

Challenges of AI de-anonymization experiments

Vitalik pointed out that recently there has been talk suggesting that AI text analysis will make online anonymity difficult to maintain. To verify this claim, he designed a simple yet clever experiment: randomly select 200 to 2000 public documents from the Ethereum ecosystem, and let AI analyze writing styles to identify the document he authored.

The core of this experiment is to test whether large models can identify a specific author’s text amid "a lot of noise." Vitalik believes that if AI can succeed, it means the threshold for anonymous writing is being lowered.

The scale of Ethereum ecosystem documents

According to Vitalik’s estimate, there are about 200 to 2000 public documents in the Ethereum ecosystem that are at least as important as the anonymous document. These include EIP proposals, technical specifications, research reports, and white papers. The number of documents may seem small, but the differences in writing styles among different authors are subtle, making it a non-trivial classification task for AI.

The authors of Ethereum documents include developers, researchers, and community contributors, each with their own writing habits and terminology preferences. Vitalik’s anonymous work is mixed among these, akin to finding a "counterfeit coin" in a pile of similar documents.

The significance for anonymous culture

This experiment is not just a technical test but also a metaphor for the anonymous culture within the crypto community. Early Ethereum relied on anonymous collaboration, and Vitalik himself used the pseudonym "Vitaliy" for years in development channels. Now, with AI capable of inferring authorship from subtle textual differences, it suggests that the boundaries of anonymous writing are shrinking.

If the experiment succeeds, it could lead to: AI-based identification of authors of EIP proposals, detection of bot accounts in community discussions, and even tracing the true contributors of technical documents.