Posted inBlockchain / Crypto / Data & Artificial Intelligence

As more people use AI, we’ll need unique proof of personhood

In a world of online impersonations, scams, multiple identities, deepfakes, and other realistic yet deceptive AI-generated content, we need “proof of personhood” — something to help us know that we’re interacting with an actual person. Fake content isn’t a new problem; what’s new is the ability to produce that content at much lower cost. AI radically decreases the marginal cost of producing content that contains all the cues we use to tell if something is “real”.

So now, more than ever, we need methods to digitally link content to people, privately. “Proof of personhood” is an important building block in establishing digital identity. But here, it becomes a mechanism for increasing the marginal cost of attacking a person or undermining the integrity of a network: Obtaining a unique ID is free for humans, but costly and difficult for AIs.

That’s why the property of privacy-preserving “uniqueness” is the next big idea in building a web we can trust. Solving for more than just proving personhood, it fundamentally changes the cost structure of attacks for malevolent actors. The “uniqueness property” — or Sybil resistance — is therefore a non-negotiable property of any proof of personhood system. — Eddy Lazzarin