The internet is awash with deep fakes, bots and AIs pretending to be humans — and a host of different projects are racing to come up with an effective solution.
Multiple studies estimate that between 5% and 15% of accounts on X are bots, and Facebook bans hundreds of millions of fake users every quarter.
Online games are also swamped with bots and AIs, used to “grind” through repetitive in-game tasks like mining or farming, or to fake activity for crypto games like Hamster Kombat to receive airdrops.
Sometimes, identifying bots is relatively straightforward, as they can be repetitive, behave erratically, or simply make errors a human would almost certainly avoid. But as with toupees, people usually only spot the bad fakes — and the tech is improving so rapidly it’s becoming difficult to tell what and who is real. Research by the University of Waterloo, Ontario, suggests that people aren’t particularly adept at spotting human replicants.
The March study invited 260 people to sort 20 images of people’s faces: 10 genuine and 10 AI-generated by Stable Diffusion or DALL-E. Only 61% of participants successfully completed the task, lower than the 85% the researchers had projected.
AI-generated images from the Waterloo study. Source: University of Waterloo
There are a variety of projects attempting to solve the problem by providing proof of humanity.
Shady El Damaty, the co-founder of the blockchain-based digital identity platform Holonym, explained how his firm uses a system called “human keys” to separate real people from imposters.
“At its core, human keys are private keys. But instead of being derived from randomness, they’re derived from human attributes like biometrics data [and] personal data like passwords […] An example would be creating a wallet from a face scan or from a social security number,” he said.
Another blockchain-based project called Civic has created a digital identification system using a “simple video feed” to confirm a person’s authenticity and uniqueness.
Civic vice president Titus Capilnean said that document verification is another approach “that adds a lot more friction to the verification process versus a simple liveness plus uniqueness.”
Other blockchain projects are plowing the same furrow. Proof of Humanity combines social verification and video submission to create an anti-Sybil verification system, while Privy is an authentication and key management platform for securely onboarding and managing users at scale.
Then there’s Worldcoin’s iris-scanning Orbs, which uses the data to create unique identifiers to provide proof of personhood. Despite incorporating ZK-proofs and implementing various privacy-preserving policies, Worldcoin provokes a lot of concern.
Privacy matters too
The big drawback to using biometrics to confirm humanity is that many privacy-conscious users are hesitant to provide biometric data to Big Tech companies.
Opposition to biometrics tends to focus on several key areas, including the risk of surveillance, issues surrounding consent and third-party data retention.
Holonym attempts to address such concerns by keeping the vast majority of data on the client’s device.
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“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, such as the client’s email address, is similar to other online services and is essential for account recoverability.
“Our philosophy is that everything should be client-side first. And if it needs to leave the client’s device, there should be some form of consent […] to be able to authorize access to any sensitive information,” Damaty said.
The application of digital ID
Back in May, LayerZero launched a massive anti-Sybil hunt, to weed out all the bots attempting to game the system to dishonestly qualify for the airdrop many times over.
It successfully identified hundreds of thousands of addresses as Sybils and/or bots and its token performance since has been significantly better than projects that handed out tokens to bot owners who then dumped them for profit.
Source: LayerZero
At the time Capilnean explained to Cointelegraph how the time-consuming Sybil hunt could have been avoided entirely by using Civic’s uniqueness test to confirm users as unique from the outset.
The applications of Digital ID systems are broader still, and can be applied even to the political process. Damaty said that during Andrew Yang’s 2020 presidential campaign anonymous DAO members wanted to donate money to him.
“But that’s illegal.” Damaty said. “You can’t fund a political campaign without verified donations from US residents. So we stepped in and helped them out.”
The system pioneered by Holonym, dubbed Know Your Anon, allowed donors to send money to Yang’s campaign while simultaneously preserving their anonymity. Using government ID, phone number/email or social security numbers, the system first allowed users to confirm US residence and then donate with an implementation of zero-knowledge technology.
The program was implemented in coordination with Lobby3, a Web3 community designed to empower ordinary people in Washington DC, and Vouched, a digital identity verification system.
“That’s when we realized what we’re building is really this public key infrastructure for all sorts of stuff, like voting and civic infrastructure,” Damaty said.
The future
The company is currently working on a project seeking to alleviate the refugee crisis in Myanmar, as the Rohingya Muslim minority population is driven from their homes into neighboring Bangladesh and Thailand.
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“The idea is to build out a better proof of humanity and legal personhood system for these refugees so that they can access banking and financial infrastructure,” Damaty told us.
Working with partners, including the UN, Refunite, Exile Hub and the Refugee Fund, Damaty hopes that Holonym will use its ultra-fast personhood-proving system as the first step to creating government credentials that allow displaced people to access vital services.
While the plan is still in its infancy, it offers another tantalizing glimpse into the potential of digital ID as a bulwark against the chaos-creating elements of the 21st century.