MIT News
Q: Why do we’d like personhood credentials?
Tobin South: AI capabilities are rapidly improving. While quite a lot of the general public discourse has been about how chatbots keep convalescing, sophisticated AI enables way more capabilities than simply a greater ChatGPT, like the power of AI to interact online autonomously. AI could have the power to create accounts, post content, generate fake content, pretend to be human online, or algorithmically amplify content at a large scale. This unlocks quite a lot of risks. You’ll be able to consider this as a “digital imposter” problem, where it’s getting harder to differentiate between sophisticated AI and humans. Personhood credentials are one potential solution to that problem.
Nouran Soliman: Such advanced AI capabilities could help bad actors run large-scale attacks or spread misinformation. The web may very well be full of AIs which can be resharing content from real humans to run disinformation campaigns. It will turn into harder to navigate the web, and social media specifically. You could possibly imagine using personhood credentials to filter out certain content and moderate content in your social media feed or determine the trust level of knowledge you receive online.
Q: What’s a personhood credential, and how will you ensure such a credential is secure?
South: Personhood credentials mean you can prove you might be human without revealing the rest about your identity. These credentials let you’re taking information from an entity like the federal government, who can guarantee you might be human, after which through privacy technology, mean you can prove that fact without sharing any sensitive details about your identity. To get a personhood credential, you’re going to have to indicate up in person or have a relationship with the federal government, like a tax ID number. There may be an offline component. You’re going to must do something that only humans can do. AIs can’t turn up on the DMV, as an illustration. And even probably the most sophisticated AIs can’t fake or break cryptography. So, we mix two ideas — the safety that we’ve got through cryptography and the indisputable fact that humans still have some capabilities that AIs don’t have — to make really robust guarantees that you simply are human.
Soliman: But personhood credentials may be optional. Service providers can let people select whether or not they need to use one or not. Immediately, if people only need to interact with real, verified people online, there isn’t a reasonable technique to do it. And beyond just creating content and talking to people, in some unspecified time in the future AI agents are also going to take actions on behalf of individuals. If I’m going to purchase something online, or negotiate a deal, then possibly in that case I would like to make certain I’m interacting with entities which have personhood credentials to make sure they’re trustworthy.
South: Personhood credentials construct on top of an infrastructure and a set of security technologies we’ve had for a long time, akin to using identifiers like an email account to sign into online services, they usually can complement those existing methods.
Q: What are among the risks related to personhood credentials, and the way could you reduce those risks?
Soliman: One risk comes from how personhood credentials may very well be implemented. There may be a priority about concentration of power. Let’s say one specific entity is the one issuer, or the system is designed in such a way that each one the ability is given to at least one entity. This might raise quite a lot of concerns for a component of the population — possibly they don’t trust that entity and don’t feel it’s secure to interact with them. We want to implement personhood credentials in such a way that individuals trust the issuers and make sure that people’s identities remain completely isolated from their personhood credentials to preserve privacy.
South: If the one technique to get a personhood credential is to physically go somewhere to prove you might be human, then that may very well be scary in case you are in a sociopolitical environment where it’s difficult or dangerous to go to that physical location. That would prevent some people from having the power to share their messages online in an unfettered way, possibly stifling free expression. That’s why it is vital to have a wide range of issuers of personhood credentials, and an open protocol to be sure that that freedom of expression is maintained.
Soliman: Our paper is attempting to encourage governments, policymakers, leaders, and researchers to take a position more resources in personhood credentials. We’re suggesting that researchers study different implementation directions and explore the broader impacts personhood credentials could have on the community. We want to be sure that we create the best policies and rules about how personhood credentials must be implemented.
South: AI is moving very fast, definitely much faster than the speed at which governments adapt. It’s time for governments and large corporations to begin fascinated about how they will adapt their digital systems to be able to prove that somebody is human, but in a way that’s privacy-preserving and secure, so we may be ready after we reach a future where AI has these advanced capabilities.
