On the 27th of March 2023, Mr Elon Musk tweeted:
“Given that modern AI can solve any “prove you’re not a robot” tests, it’s now trivial to spin up 100k human-like bots for less than a penny per account.
Paid verification increases bot cost by ~10,000% & makes it much easier to identify bots by phone & CC clustering.
Obvious conclusion: paid account social media will be the only social media that matters.”
How predictable. A nice business case for Twitter and its “blue check-mark” paid accounts.
But he has a point. One potential development of GPT-powered AIs, easily programmable and accessible as time goes by, is the ability to create millions of “fake” or ghost social media accounts to manipulate opinion and push various ideologically, politically or financially driven agendas. All one needs is to automate the process of creating email addresses, getting virtual phone numbers for “verification” of an account, and then prompt a GPT bot to take ownership of the account and post according to a preset narrative and behavioural pattern.
Such bots could even be programmed to follow other people, to post pictures from time to time, respond to tweets depending on context, post content at random intervals mirroring human behaviour and so on, making them indistinguishable from “real” content posted by humans.
Elon seems to think that paid accounts is the only way out. I tend to disagree. I believe, on the contrary, that such a development will favor the emergence of decentralized social media which rely on blockchain and tools such as the “web-of-trust” protocol to ensure that accounts are controlled by human users.
The web-of-trust protocol essentially relies on creating a human generated “web” of connections. In order to enter into this web, one has to meet other people who “validate” your account, and thereby certify that you are a human. Such certificates must be renewed ever so often. Such a system would reinforce social bonds and human physical contact and interactions as the foundation for trust. Such bonds are organic in nature. Social networks already have “maps” of how humans network with each other, and their general behavioural patterns. “Gaming” the system would require many rogue actors getting together and certifying “fake” AI controlled accounts. But even in such a case, it would be easy to identify the AI controlled accounts since their certificates would always be issued by the same accounts who created/certified them in the first place, since they could not meet another human in “real life” and ask for their certification.
Learn more about the web-of-trust here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust
Blockchain and decentralized technologies are therefore key in order to avoid going down the road of having to pay to actually prove you exist as a person.
If you’ve enjoyed this article, I encourage you to check out my new book: “From the Singularity, with Love: a message to humanity”, as it will certainly change your perspective on AI.
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