Personhood credentials: Artificial intelligence and the value of privacy-preserving tools to distinguish who is real online

Hey CCG'ers,

I'm thrilled to announce a new research paper that's been in the
making for many months now about Personhood Credentials (PHCs),
artificial intelligence, and the value of privacy-preserving solutions
to online disinformation. A quick excerpt from the executive summary
of the paper:

Malicious actors have long used misleading identities to deceive
others online. They carry out fraud, cyberattacks, and disinformation
campaigns from multiple online aliases, email addresses, and phone
numbers. Historically, such deception has sometimes seemed an
unfortunate but necessary cost of preserving the Internet’s
commitments to privacy and unrestricted access. But highly capable AI
systems may change the landscape: There is a substantial risk that,
without further mitigations, deceptive AI-powered activity could
overwhelm the Internet. To uphold user privacy while protecting
against AI-powered deception, new countermeasures are needed.

A few of us from this community (KimHD, WayneC, WendyS, HeatherF) have
been working with researchers from OpenAI, Harvard, MIT, Oxford,
Microsoft, OpenMined, Berkman Klein, and 20+ other organizations
involved in frontier Artificial Intelligence to determine how we (the
digital credentials community) might address some of the more
concerning aspects of how AI systems will interact with the Web and
the Internet, but in a way that will continue to protect individual
privacy and civil liberties that remain at the foundation of the Web
we want.

A huge shout out to Steven Adler, Zoë Hitzig, and Shrey Jain who led
this work and put together an amazing group of people to work with --
it was a pleasure and honor to work with them as they did the
lionshare of the cat herding and drafting, re-drafting, and
re-re-re-re-drafting of the paper. It's rare to be a part of such a
high energy and velocity collaboration, so thanks to each of them for
making this happen!

For those of you that are on social media, Steven has done a great
visual summary of the paper here:

https://x.com/sjgadler/status/1824245211322568903

The paper itself is really well written and reasoned. If you don't
have a ton of time, you can come away with a good idea of what the
paper is about by just reading the 3 page Executive Summary:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.07892

The TL;DR is: This community is well positioned to do something about
online deception, defense against AI amplification attacks, and proof
of personhood credentials. So the question is -- should we? What could
be the benefits to society? What are the dangers to privacy and civil
liberties? As always, interested in your thoughts... :)

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny - https://www.linkedin.com/in/manusporny/
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
https://www.digitalbazaar.com/

Received on Friday, 16 August 2024 01:23:50 UTC