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Tim Bouma 1y ago

The latest academic paper on “personhood credentials” - a purported solution to solve the problem of deep fakes, AI bots, authenticity, etc., on the internet.

My questions are: who gets to issue the personhood credentials? Why can you only have one? Who enforces this.

My take is that there is still not an appreciation of the root of the problem. Enabling self-generated npubs and signed events to begin with. Without that starting point, an eventual authoritarian intervention is unavoidable.

Curious if anyone else has takes on this paper?

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.07892

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jimbocoin 🃏 1y ago

“Real” is overrated. What matters is what an entity can DO, not whether it happens to be biological.

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Tim Bouma 1y ago

I think the only way to guarantee a “personhood credential” is to demand a urine sample before issuance.

Kidding aside, I read these papers, and despite their good intentions, I see red flags everywhere. The next step is to convince a policymaker this is the way to go, and boom, you’ll need a license to access the internet.

Bottom line, I am trying to figure out what they are missing, and what we are seeing differently, if that is indeed the case.

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jimbocoin 🃏 1y ago

Proof-of-humanity is overrated, IMO. There are just so many cases where it doesn’t matter.

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Tim Bouma 1y ago

That’s my view as well. Let an #npub justify itself within whatever context it’s being used.