Karly

This week marks one year since the release of The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor Swift’s album that left many of us slightly feral, wildly inspired, or both. But funnily enough, this post isn’t about Taylor. It’s not about poetry or heartbreak or the album at all. It’s about authorship attribution.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: Why this? Why now? And the answer is… because not too long ago, I was scammed.

Let me set the scene.

Some of you already know this little bit of Karly Lore: I collect vinyls. Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter ones, mostly, but I also have a soft spot for rare pressings and live recordings. Some are incredibly easy to find. Others are… Folklore Long Pond Studio Sessions level rare.

So, imagine my excitement when I found a copy of that exact edition on Instagram, priced lower than usual, sold by a page that looked like one of the many trustworthy secondhand sellers I’d bought from before. The account posted aesthetic photos of records, used casual language that sounded like a fellow fangirl, and even replied to my messages with the kind of friendliness that makes you feel like you’re talking to a real person.

I paid via bank transfer, confident that everything would be fine.

A few days later, the page blocked me. The record never arrived. I’d been scammed.

Trusting the Voice

The reason I’m telling you this is because the scam didn’t work because I was naive. It worked because the voice felt right.

The scammer sounded like someone I would follow. They used the same abbreviations and emojis, knew their way around Swiftie lingo, and spoke in the same online dialect that vinyl-collecting girls on Instagram often do. They mimicked the way we talk, and I trusted that voice.

Which got me thinking about authorship. More specifically, about how we recognise authorship. What does it mean to sound like someone? What makes a piece of writing feel like it came from a particular person? Can someone else convincingly take on your voice? And how do we know when they do?

These are questions at the heart of authorship attribution—the linguistic field that studies how we identify who wrote what, based on their use of language.

What Is Authorship Attribution?

In simple terms, authorship attribution is the process of analysing a piece of text and figuring out who wrote it. It’s a field that combines literary analysis, statistics, and forensic linguistics. Some of the most famous cases, like debates over who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays, have relied on stylometry, a branch of authorship attribution that looks at things like word frequency, sentence length, and grammatical patterns.

But it’s not all about historical mysteries. Authorship attribution also plays a role in modern-day issues like online impersonation, anonymous threats, and yes, even AI-generated content. If you’ve ever tried to figure out whether a tweet or blog post really came from the person it’s credited to, you’ve dabbled in authorship attribution too.

Style Is a Fingerprint

One of the coolest things about language is that we all have habits, tiny quirks in how we write, even when we don’t notice them. Some people overuse exclamation marks (guilty), others always say “literally” or “kinda” or “like” or “honestly.” These stylistic fingerprints are what allow us to identify authorship, especially when you zoom out and look at enough data.

It’s also why authorship attribution gets trickier the more someone tries to sound like someone else. Good mimics can adopt tone, choice of topic, even vocabulary. But it’s hard to fake the deep-level patterns. Sentence structure. Punctuation rhythm. How often you use passive voice. What you do with adverbs. That’s the real giveaway.

The scammer I dealt with had clearly studied how vinyl sellers speak. They sounded real, because she knew what we expect from real. But if I had looked more closely, maybe I would’ve noticed something off in the phrasing. A lack of consistency. Something slightly too polished or slightly too chaotic. In other words, I might’ve caught the cracks in their authorship mask.

From Swifties to Shakespeare

Authorship attribution has been used to explore disputed Shakespeare texts, confirm co-writers in historical documents, and, more recently, detect ghostwriters in celebrity memoirs. And it’s part of how people try to figure out who writes what in modern collaborations, whether it’s on Reddit, Twitter, or even in songwriting (yes, even Taylor’s discography is sometimes scrutinised for ghostwriting rumors).

The thing is, authorship isn’t just about the name on the page. It’s about the voice behind it. And in a world of curated personas and AI-generated everything, that question “Whose words are these, really?” feels more urgent than ever.

Lessons in Language (and Life)

Getting scammed sucked. I’m not going to pretend it didn’t. But it also reminded me how powerful language is. How convincing someone can be when they know how to sound right. And how much our trust, online and offline, relies on the voices we think we recognise.

So no, this post isn’t about The Tortured Poets Department. But maybe it’s a little bit about poetry. And a little bit about being tortured. And a lot about the words we use, and the people we believe behind them.

If you’ve ever bought from an online seller, studied a writer’s style, or even wondered whether a message sounded like someone you knew, congrats, you’ve thought about authorship attribution too.

As both Taylor Swift and Shakespeare would say though, all’s well that ends well, I managed to secure a Folklore Long Pond Studio Sessions vinyl from a reputable online marketplace. Might just make it the featured image of this post.

And if you see a Long Pond Studio Sessions vinyl for sale for too-good-to-be-true prices… run.

Let’s Chat:
Have you ever been scammed online? Or have you ever just known something wasn’t written by the person who signed it? I’d love to hear your stories.

PS: Very special thanks to my friend Fer for the title.