philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

AI researchers call for ‘personhood credentials’ as bots get smarter

... In the paper, published online last week but not yet peer-reviewed, a group of 32 researchers from OpenAI, Microsoft, Harvard and other institutions call on technologists and policymakers to develop new ways to verify humans without sacrificing people’s privacy or anonymity. They propose a system of “personhood credentials” by which people prove offline that they physically exist as humans and receive an encrypted credential that they can use to log in to a wide range of online services. ...

But the authors argue that existing systems for proving one’s humanity, such as requiring users to submit a selfie or solve a CAPTCHA puzzle, are increasingly “inadequate against sophisticated AI.” In the near future, they add, even holding a video chat with someone may not be enough to tell whether they’re the person they claim to be, another person disguising themselves with AI or “even a complete AI simulation of a real or fictitious person.” ...

The researchers propose instead that personhood credentials should allow people to interact online anonymously without their activities being tracked. ...

In an emailed statement via an OpenAI representative, Adler said the paper’s goal is to establish the value of personhood credentials in general, while highlighting the criteria and design challenges that any such system should take into account. ...

If artificial intelligence systems can convincingly impersonate humans, he mused, presumably they could also hire humans to do their bidding. ...

Chris Gilliard, an independent privacy researcher and surveillance scholar,  said it’s worth asking why the onus should be on individuals to prove their humanity rather than on the AI companies to prevent their bots from impersonating humans, as some experts have suggested. ...

See the full story here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/21/human-bot-personhood-credentials-worldcoin/