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0 points_factor1y ago0 comments

The problem is accountability. Imagine starting a trade show business in the physical world as an example.

One day you start getting a bunch of people come in to mess with the place. You can identify them and their organization, then promptly remove them. If they continue, there are legal ramifications.

On the web, these people can be robots that look just like real people until you spend a while studying their behavior. Worse if they’re real people being paid for sabotage.

In the real world, you arrest them and find the source. Online they can remain anonymous and protected. What recourse do we have beyond splitting the web into a “verified ID” web, and a pseudonymous analog? We can’t keep treating potential computer engagement the same as human forever. As AI agents inevitably get cheaper and harder to detect, what choice will we have?

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supriyo-biswas1y ago

To be honest, I don't like initiatives towards a "verified web" either, and am very scared of the effects on anonymity that stuff like Apple's PAT, Chrome's now deprecated WEI or Cloudflare's similar efforts to that end are aimed at.

Not to say that these would just cement the position of Google and Microsoft and block off the rest of us from building alternatives to their products.

I feel that the current state of things are fine; I was eventually able to restrict most abuse in an acceptable way with few false positives. However, what I wished for was that more people would understand these tradeoffs instead of jumping to uncharitable interpretations not backed by real world experience as a conclusion.

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