personhood credential
In plain wordsA digital pass that lets you prove online that you are a real human, not an AI or a bot, without having to reveal who you are.
A proposed form of digital ID that tells an online service only one thing, that a real human rather than an AI system or bot is behind an account, while privacy-preserving cryptography keeps the holder's identity hidden. Under the proposal, trusted issuers such as state agencies or other organizations would give out a limited number per person, and checks need not involve biometrics. The motivation is that AI can now pass for human online and can be deployed at scale for little cost, which defeats CAPTCHAs and similar defenses against fraud, spam and coordinated disinformation, whereas full identity verification would sacrifice too much privacy. Its authors and critics discuss risks of excluding people without credentials, of concentrating power in issuers, and of surveillance if the design is weakened.
The forum lets anyone read, but posting now requires a personhood credential.
Origin
Proposed by Steven Adler, Zoë Hitzig, Shrey Jain, Catherine Brewer and many co-authors from industry, academia and civil society in 'Personhood credentials: Artificial intelligence and the value of privacy-preserving tools to distinguish who is real online', posted to arXiv on 15 August 2024.
Related
- dead internet theorydead internet theory, n.: The idea, first a fringe conspiracy theory, that much of what we see online is now made by bots and AI rather than by real people.
- agent identityagent identity, n.: The ways of proving which AI agent is acting, for whom and with what permissions — so websites, companies and other agents can tell trustworthy agents from impostors and hold someone responsible.
- deepfakedeepfake, n.: A fake but realistic video, photo or voice recording made with AI that puts words in a real person's mouth or shows them in a scene that never happened.
- disinformationdisinformation, n.: Deliberate falsehoods or distortions dressed up as fact, for example from a government or campaign trying to sway an election or sow distrust.
- AI watermarkingAI watermarking, n.: Hiding an invisible signal in AI-generated text, images, audio or video so that software can later tell the content was made by AI — like a banknote's watermark, but undetectable to the eye.
- Content CredentialsContent Credentials, prop. n.: A tamper-evident 'nutrition label' attached to a photo, video or document recording where it came from — which camera or AI tool made it and how it was edited — that anyone can inspect.
Sources
- Adler, S., Hitzig, Z., Jain, S., Brewer, C. et al. (2024). Personhood credentials: Artificial intelligence and the value of privacy-preserving tools to distinguish who is real online. arXiv:2408.07892. arxiv.org/abs/2408.07892