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

Nice work!

It also reminds me of the polymorphic pseudonyms by Eric Verheul and Bart Jacobs (2017) - see https://www.nieuwarchief.nl/serie5/pdf/naw5-2017-18-3-168.pdf

Nice to see new contributions that (also) focus on what it takes before it can actually be used.

Rieks

-----Original Message-----
From: Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>
Sent: 16 August 2024 03:23
To: W3C Credentials CG <public-credentials@w3.org>
Subject: 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/


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Received on Friday, 16 August 2024 05:38:40 UTC