Why wouldn't criminals like they do now just use stolen identities? If someone verifies they are a person that doesn't mean they're not leaving their PC on with some AI that uses their credentials either.

Invite trees approximately solve this problem. I don't need to know who you are to know that someone in good standing in the community invited you.

No credential will be sufficient, this is basically an unsolvable enforcement problem. That doesn't obviate the utility of rules and norms, but there's no airtight system which will hold back AI generated content.

I feel like we need a distributed system/protocol that allows people to have pseudonyms not linked to their real identity, but with a shared reputation/trust score, so if you’re a bad actor using a pseudonym your real identity and all your other sock puppets are penalized too.

I know very little about this but sense that some combination of buzzwords like homomorphic encryption, zk-snarks, and yes, blockchains could be useful.

Of course this would present problems if any of your identities were ever compromised and your reputation destroyed.

Problem is, if a token is anonymous, then it follows that it can be bought and sold. Which breaks the original use case of the token, right?

That is exactly what will happen. The sad thing is, it needs to happen. I've found myself advocating for this lately, when 10 years ago, I wouldn't have even considered taking that position.

If Web3-like session-signing had taken off enough to become OS or even browser-native, we would have had a fighting chance of remaining mostly anonymous. But that just didn't happen, and isn't going to happen. Mostly because fraud ruined Web3.

Reputation tracking is the key. The most simple option is open-invite invite-only spaces: Any user can invite more users, but only users with an invite can participate. Most Discord servers work like this, secret societies like the Oddfellows do, as does the other site.

If you keep track of the invite tree, you can "prune" it as needed to reduce moderation load: low quality users don't tend to be the source of high-quality users, and in the cases where they are, those high quality users tend find other people willing to vouch for them faster than their inviter catches a ban.

> Someone using an LLM is craft a reply is not a problem on it's own.

No, someone using an LLM to craft a reply is a problem in its own. I want to hear what a human has to say, not a human filtered through a computer program. No grammar editing, nothing. Give me your actual writing or I'm not interested.

If you had the LLM write the comment, then it wasn't your thoughts.

I sometimes wonder if people aren't forgetting why we're on this platform.

The goal is to have an interesting discourse and maybe grow as a human by broadening your horizon. The likelihood of that happening with llms talking for you is basically nil, hence... Why even go through the motion at that point? It's not like you get anything for upvotes on HN

Amusingly your comment carries some of the tropes of AI authorship ("is not a problem on it's own....is the problem") but it's not shaped like a profound insight is being discovered in every line is what makes it human.

How much of AI writing will pass under the radar when the big companies aren't all maximizing to generate the most engagement hacking content in a chatbot UI? Maybe it'll still stand out for being low quality, but I'm not sure. There's lots of low quality human authored content.

Not sure where my comment is going, I just kinda rambled.

I think this is the most likely and best path. There's no stopping the flood of bots, the dead internet theory is beyond just a theory at this point.

Best we can do, for the internet and ourselves, is to move away from it and into smaller networks that can be more effectively moderated, and where there is still a level of "human verification" before someone gets invited to participate.

I don't like what that will do to being able to find information publicly, though. The big advantage of internet forums (that have all but disappeared into private discords) is search ability/discoverability. Ran into a problem, or have a question about some super niche project or hobby? Good chance someone else on the net also has it and made a post about it somewhere, and the post & answers are public.

Moving more and more into private communities removes that, and that is a great loss IMO.

The utility of those larger sites is coming to an end, but most people aren't discerning or ambitious enough to leave and seek out the smaller places you mentioned. Places like this will remain but will join Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter as shadows of their prior useful selves. The smaller, better sites won't have to worry about attracting the masses and therefore worsening, because the masses have finally settled.

This issue (human attestation) is the product of these AI companies. They are poisoning the well, only to sell the cure. This may not have initially been the plan of many of these companies, but it is the eventual end goal of all of them. Very similar to war profiteers, selling both the problem and the solution simultaneously has yet to be illegalized, but has long been masterfully capitalized, and will be vigourously because nobody will stop it.

Years ago (around 2020, when GPT-2 and 3 became publicly available) I noticed and was incredibly critical of how prevalent LLM-generated content was on reddit. I was permanently banned for "abusing reports" for reporting AI-generated comments as spam. Before that, I had posted about how I believed that the the fight against bots was over because the uncanny valley of text generation had been crossed; prior to the public availability of LLMs, most spam/bot comments were either shotgunned scripts that are easily blockable by the most rudimentary of spam filters, generated gibberish created by markov chains, or simply old scraped comments being reposted. The landscape of bot operation at the time largely relied on gaming human interaction, which required carefuly gaming temporal-relevance of text content, coherence of text content (in relation to comment chains), and the most basic attempt at appearing to be organic.

After LLMs became publicly available, text content that was temporally, contextually, and coherently relevant could be generated instantly for free. This removed practically every non-platform-imposed friction for a bot to be successful on reddit (and to generalize, anywhere that people interact). Now the onus of determining what is and isn't organic interaction is squarely on the platform, which is a difficult problem because now bot operators have had much of their work freed up, and can solely focus on gaming platform heuristics instead of also having to game human perception.

This is where AI companies come in to monetize the disaster they have created; by offering fingerprinting services for content they generate, detection services for content made by themselves and others, and estimations of human authenticity for content of any form. All while they continue to sell their services that contradict these objectives, and after having stolen literally everything that has ever been on the internet to accomplish this.

These people are evil. Not these companies - they are legal constructions that don't think or feel or act. These people are evil.

One should highlight the best part of this: https://www.toolsforhumanity.com/orb

An orb that scans your eyeballs for "proof of human".

It's not clear to me how this is verifiable without constant hardware supervision. Even that'll get cracked, just like DVD encryption back in the day.

You almost need dedicated hardware that can't run any other software except a mechanical keyboard and make it communicate over an analog medium - something terribly expensive and inconvenient for AI farms to duplicate.

Grok will post CP on twitter, you think it won't swear?

People who are posting AI comments or setting up AI bots are... people. They can show their ID. If a website owner doesn't have a way to ban that specific human and the bad guy can always get another voucher, it's sort of meaningless.

In fact, even if you can ban the human for life, I'm not sure it solves anything. There are billions of people out there and there's money to be made by monetizing attention. AI-generated content is a way to do that, so there's plenty of takers who don't mind the risk of getting booted from some platform once in a blue moon if it makes them $5k/month without requiring any effort or skill.

Perhaps not only just show your id to get your "Over age X verification object", but your ID also gets irreversibly altered (like a punch card) that makes it one-time-use only.

That might make it less likely someone would ever sell it because to get a new one might take a very long "cool-down" time and it'd severely hamper the seller.

what’s to keep people from selling or giving away those id tags? seems like a nefarious entity could buy them in bulk

I'll sell you my proof-of-human-age badge for $1,000.

I think we’ll see a return to smaller groups and implementing a lot of systems the way we do it IRL. I think you could definitely do a more fine-grained system that progressively adds less score to contacts the further away they are. In combination with some type of accumulating reputation system, you’d have both a force to keep out unknown IDs, but also a reason for one to stick to their current ID even though it’s anonymous.

Adding this type of rep system would destroy a lot of what is so cool about the internet though. There’d probably be segregation based on rep if it’s very visible, new IDs drowning in a sea of noise. Being anonymous but with a record isn’t the same as posting for the very first time as a completely blank identity and still being given an audience. Making online comms more like real life would alleviate some problems but would also lose part of the reason they’re used in the first place. I don’t see much any other way to do it besides maybe a state-provided anonymous identity provider (though that’s risky for a number of reasons), but it’s going to be sad to see things go.