[eru]

> I was imagining the message encoded in clear text, not encrypted form, [...]

I was considering that, but I came to the conclusion that it would be an exceedingly poor choice.

Steganography is there to hide that a message has been sent at all. If you make it do double duty as a poor-man's encryption, you are going to have a bad time.

> As such, I approached it as a toy problem, and considered detection by savvy parties to be a feature, not a bug; I imagined something more like a pirate broadcast than a secure line, and intentionally ignored the presumption about the message being encrypted first.

That's an interesting toy problem. In that case, I would still suggest to compress the message, to reduce redundancy.

[textninja]

> If you make it do double duty as a poor-man's encryption, you are going to have a bad time.

For the serious use cases you evidently have in mind, yes, it's folly to have it do double duty, but at the end of the day steganography is an obfuscation technique orthogonal to encryption, so the question of whether to use encryption or not is a nuanced one. Anyhow, I don't think it's fair to characterize this elaborate steganography tech as a poor-man's encryption — LLM tokens are expensive!

[eru]

> Anyhow, I don't think it's fair to characterize this elaborate steganography tech as a poor-man's encryption — LLM tokens are expensive!

I guess it's a "rich fool's encryption".

[textninja]

Haha, sure, you can call it that if you want, but foolish is cousin to fun, so one application of this tech would be as a comically overwrought way of communicating subtext to an adversary who may not be able to read between the lines otherwise. Imagine using all this highly sophisticated and expensive technology just to write "you're an asshole" to some armchair intelligence analyst who spent their afternoon and monthly token quota decoding your secret message.

Seed for the message above is 42 by the way.

(Just kidding!)