30s Summary

The internet is increasingly fraught with deep fakes and bots masquerading as humans, resulting in a growing number of projects aiming to curb this issue. Constant improvement in technology means many people struggle to differentiate between real people and AI. Efforts to combat the problem include Holonym’s human keys, derived from biometric and personal data, Civic’s digital identity system utilising video feeds, and Worldcoin’s iris-scanning project. However, concerns over user privacy, surveillance and data retention issues remain. Additionally, leveraging such digital identity measures can aid in areas such as refugee crisis and political campaign funding, representing the future potential of digital ID technology.

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The internet is now full of deep fakes, bots and AIs trying to act like humans. A ton of different projects are racing to fix this problem.

Loads of studies suggest that up to 15% of accounts on X are bots. Facebook gets rid of hundreds of millions of fake accounts every 3 months. Bots are also everywhere in online games, doing repeat tasks like mining or farming, or pretending to be active in games like Hamster Kombat to get airdrops.

Lots of times, it can be super easy to spot bots as they can act weird, make mistakes that a real person wouldn’t, or just keep saying the same thing. But what makes this harder is that tech is getting better so quickly that it’s getting harder and harder to tell if someone is real or not. In fact, a study that the University of Waterloo carried out in March basically told us that most of us aren’t that great at telling the difference between real people and AI.

Their study asked 260 participants to put 20 images of people’s faces into two groups: real faces and faces made by AI. Around 61% of people were able to do this, much lower than the estimated 85% the researchers expected to be able to tell the difference.

There are plenty of projects trying to fix this problem. Shady El Damaty, co-founder of digital identity platform Holonym, mentions how his company uses something called ‘human keys’ to tell the difference between real people and bots.

In its basics, human keys are private keys. But instead of just being random, they’re derived from human attributes like biometric data and personal data like passwords. An example would be creating a wallet from a face scan or from a social security number.

Another project called Civic has created a digital identity system using a simple video feed to make sure a person is who they say they are.

Vice president of Civic, Titus Capilnean, mentioned that they also use document verification, which makes the verification process a bit slower.

There’s also Worldcoin’s iris-scanning project, which uses your iris data to create unique identifiers to confirm you’re a real person. Despite using ZK-proofs and various other methods to keep your privacy, Worldcoin has raised a lot of concerns.

It’s also important to remember the user privacy. Many users are hesitant to give biometric data to Big Tech companies. The main concerns being the risk of surveillance, issues surrounding consent and third-party data retention. Holonym tries to get around these concerns by keeping most of the data on the user’s device.

“I would say like about 80% to 90% of all data that we deal with stays on the consumer device,” Damaty said. The information Holonym does keep – like the client’s email address – is similar to other online services and is needed for account recovery.

Damaty also gave some insight into how digital ID can be used. Back in May, LayerZero started a massive search to find all the bots cheating the system. It successfully found hundreds of thousands of bogus addresses. The performance of its token has since been a lot better than other projects that gave tokens to bot owners who then sold them for profit.

Damaty also mentioned an example where they used digital ID in the 2020 presidential campaign. Anonymous members of DAO wanted to donate money to Andrew Yang. But you can’t fund a political campaign without verified donations from US residents. So Holonym stepped in and helped them out.

Their system allowed donors to send money to Yang’s campaign while keeping their anonymity.

Holonym is also currently working on a project trying to ease the refugee crisis in Myanmar, as the Rohingya Muslim minority are being driven out of their homes into neighboring Bangladesh and Thailand.

“The idea is to build out a better proof of humanity and legal personhood system for these refugees,” Damaty told us. We’re hoping that this will allow displaced people to access vital services.

While these plans are just getting started, they give us a hint of what’s possible with digital ID as a shield against the chaos of the 21st century.

Source: Cointelegraph