everyone is dunking on this nikita post, and while i think the timeline is too aggressive, the trend is correct and already happening today.
don't believe me? here are some headlines from the past two months:
- cURL no longer accepting bug bounties bc of bots
- ring is now offering video verifications after the wave of fake doorbell cam videos
- openai is experimenting with using worldID to make a humans-only social network
- arxiv stopped accepting CS position papers bc of LLM-spam
- us senator displays ai-edited photo in congress
to build some intuition as to why this is happening now, consider this: in the past, a small percentage of people and things you saw online were fake or were obviously fake. even as this percentage grew, we could use general filtering and blacklisting to weed it out. but this is already failing as ai-generated content becomes ubiquitous and indistinguishable from the real thing. in 2 years, you will be the facebook boomers you laugh at today. a world where the quantity and quality of bots and content increases 1000x is one where the signal is completely drowned out and noise is the default.
current approaches to ai detection are stuck in the same cat-and-mouse game and suffer from this inherent asymmetry: it's much much cheaper to attack than defend. but this is not a new dynamic. we've faced this same problem in other domains in the past, and we’ve solved it by using cryptography to flip the costs, making attacking expensive and verification basically free.
consider:
- the transition from allowing software by default and relying on antivirus -> signed binaries only
- email spamming and domain spoofing -> SPF/DKIM/DMARC now basically mandatory
- password susceptibility to reuse and bruteforce -> passkeys
- http -> https / tls by default
in all of these domains, we flipped from a blacklist “allow-by-default” model to a gated whitelist model as they became more mature and more lucrative to exploit. it would be strange if other digital realms didn’t follow suit.
there are some promising projects working on content and human verification (c2pa for photo auth, companies like
dijie.me and
roc.camera, obviously
@worldcoin and the new world id 4.0, zkpassport), but these are all quite nascent. building and getting over the cold start problem for adopting any standard requires a huge amount of coordination, and it’s much harder to coordinate 7B people than a bunch of engineers.
i don’t know what the future holds, but it’s clear that we’re entering humanity’s whitelist era.
enjoy your eternal september.