Proving Yourself Human

MIT News recently posted an article entitled, 3 Questions: How to prove humanity online. Their main concern is how the advancements in A.I. could result in too many fake online accounts masquerading as real people.

AI could have the ability to create accounts, post content, generate fake content, pretend to be human online, or algorithmically amplify content at a massive scale. This unlocks a lot of risks. You can think of this as a “digital imposter” problem, where it is getting harder to distinguish between sophisticated AI and humans.

How do you know who is real? The solution, they believe, is to have an encrypted ID attached to a real identifier verified by government or other agencies.

To get a personhood credential, you are going to have to show up in person or have a relationship with the government, like a tax ID number.

And here we see a potential backdoor to regulating your access to the internet in the name of "safety and security." Of course the authors assure us this would be voluntary, but politicians in both parties here in the US want to regulate access, and this is an ideal tool. It's also supposedly planned to be voluntary for websites and their users, but I have deep doubts once the precedent is set.

If government is the party responsible for determining identity as human, how can we be sure they won't allow themselves sock puppets for propaganda? Further, it doesn't address the problems we see now where real people plagiarize robots for fake content.

AI is moving very fast, certainly much faster than the speed at which governments adapt.

This is why the government is the worst possible way to address any real concerns. Legislation is reactive, not proactive. Government applies old laws to new technologies regardless of merit, and we've already seen it happen with treating crypto as a security. We may have real problems coming, but we can handle it without technocratic overlords dictating who is allowed to be deemed "human."