Comment by SubiculumCode
1 month ago
Maybe HN needs to have a real ID verification? One account per official government ID. I remember when social media companies like Facebook and others pushed really hard for it, and how I resisted, but now...well, maybe its a good thing to know that if I am talking to someone they are either a person, or the dedicated bot for that person, rather than to a host of propaganda selling swarms of bots trying to crack our brains for power and profit.
I strongly believe that users will start to demand proof of humanity (and related things like content credentials on photos/videos), and eventually filter out anything that isn't verified. Through great expense and loss of privacy, we will eventually claw our way back to an internet that looks more or less the same as it was in 2020.
Unfortunately, less privileged users will have to endure the sea of AI content that still preys on the unauthenticated. It will be like using the web without an ad blocker, but 1000X worse.
It's fairly easy to "farm" real ID NFC data since majority of documents are not intended to be actual digital signing key. And on top of that AI is getting pretty good at generating face / video details to the point where simple biometric data verification is also quite useless.
I was thinking the time for the old PGP Web of Trust idea might have finally come [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust