• generative AI makes it very easy for anyone to flood the internet with generated text, audio, images, and videos.

    And? There’s already way too much data online to read or watch all of it. We could just move to a “watermark” system where everyone takes credit for their contributions. Things without watermarks could just be dismissed, since they have as much authority as an anonymous comment.

      • How would that work?

        AIs learn from existing images, they could just as well learn to reproduce a tattoo and link the pattern to a person’s name. Recreating it from different angles, would require more training data, but ultimately would get there.

        • For public ones, depending on what people started getting, it’d really strain the AIs. You could go in like 1 or two ways, probably different people getting both.

          Something very uniform but still unique, like a QR code kind of deal, AIs would hallucinate the crap out of that. Or abstractions, like people do to change the way the shape of their face to combat facial recognition.

          For private ones, just don’t ever get it photographed, any image showing that area without it would be probably fake.

          • Not like that. A server name that can be authenticated. Like when you receive an email from your bank (in the metadata), you know it’s legitimate. Each organization can set up their own server to host things they vouch for. With ActivityPub it can be viewed elsewhere with the guarantee that it’s from a trusted source.

              • Sure, but so do a lot of other things that aren’t as costly. If NFTs were the first secure way to authenticate things online we wouldn’t have had online banking until very recently

                  • What NFTs (and crypto in general) do is very different from a web of trust style approach

                    Crypto creates one source of absolute truth, the Blockchain, costly computed via consensus.

                    Web of trust, on the other hand, requires you to declare which accounts you trust. Via public-private key signing, you can always verify that a post is actually made by a specific person, and if you trust that person (e.g. because you’ve met them before and exchanged keys), you know it’s legit. You can then extend that system by also trusting accounts your trusted accounts verified, etc

      • Why would anyone pay for the service? Having a “name” is free, and that dumb worldcoin only works for people. It can’t work for governments or businesses.

        ActivityPub is actually a good way to authenticate things. If an organization vouches for something they can post it on their server and it can be viewed elsewhere.

        • I think the idea of WorldCoin is to have a “wallet” linked to a single physical person, then you can sign any work with your key, that you got by proving you are a real person.

          IMHO, the coin part is just a hype element to get people to sign up for the password part.

          As for ActivityPub, I don’t see how it helps with anything. An organization vouching for something, can already post it on their web, or if they want a distributed system, post it on IPFS.