LLMs can guess your nationality

Given a sample of your writing, Claude is pretty good at guessing your nationality. Discovered via Zvi Mowshowitz, who is a great source on AI news in general.

It guessed that I’m German when given each of my blog posts, which seems pretty impressive. ChatGPT did significantly worse for myself and some friends I asked.

I’m not fully confident how reliable this actually is, given that German is a simple guess among the European languages. When asked about what gave it away, it brought up some phrasings that it said reminded it of a German speaker. But then it would backtrack and say that each one was natural and could come from a native speaker as well.

I figure that even if no individual sentence is a clear indicator of somebody’s origin then, people’s style still has a certain vibe that is influenced by one’s upbringing. It can be hard to pinpoint, but taken as a whole, it still contains a signal that LLMs are just great at extracting. That, or I gave it away some other way it could pick up on.