"we will just be offline more"

I think it will be quite some time into the future, before AI can impersonate humans in real life. Neither hardware, nor software is there, maybe something to fool humans for a first glance maybe, but nothing that would be convincing for a real interaction.

If your solution to this problem is the web of trust, to be blunt, you don't have a solution. I am techie whose social circle is mostly other techies, and I know precisely zero people who have ever used PGP keys or any other WoT-based system, despite 30 years of evangelism. It's just not a thing anybody wants.

"Web of Trust" has been the proposed answer for, what, 30 years now? But everyone is too lazy to implement and abide by it.

well, he was arguing that it's not worse than 99% of the human slop that gets posted, so where do you draw the line?

* well crafted, human only? * Well crafted, whether human or AI? * Poorly crafted, human * well crafted, AI only * Poorly crafted, AI only * Just junk?

etc.

I think people will intuitively get a feel for when content is only AI generated. If people spend time writing a prompt that doesn't make it so wordy, and has personality, and it OK, then fine.

Also, big opportunity going to be out there for AI detected content, whether in forums, coming in inmail inboxes, on your corp file share, etc...

Smaller communities too.

I grew up in... slightly rural america in the 80s-90s, we had probably a couple of dozen local BBSes the community was small enough that after a bit I just knew who everyone was OR could find out very easily.

When the internet came along in the early 90s and I started mudding and hanging out in newsgroups I liked them small where I could get to know most of the userbase, or at least most of the posing userbase. Once mega 'somewhat-anonymous' (i.e. posts tied to a username, not like 4chan madness) communities like slashdot, huge forums, etc started popping up and now with even more mega-communities like twitter and reddit. We lost something, you can now throw bombs without consequence.

I now spend most of my online time in a custom built forum with ~200 people in it that we started building in an invite only way. It's 'internally public' information who invited who. It's much easier to have a civil conversation there, though we still do get the occasional flame-out. Having a stable identity even if it's not tied to a government name is valuable for a thriving and healthy community.

Honestly, having seen how it can be used against you, retroactively, I would never ever engage in a discussion under my real name.

(The fact that someone could correlate posts[0] based on writing style, as previously demonstrated on HN and used to doxx some people, makes things even more convoluted - you should think twice what you write and where.)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016

id.me?

Not government owned, but even irs.gov uses it

I do this every time I find myself typing something I could get written up over or even fired for.

1. I'm usually too emotional to write out why I feel that way instead of saying what I feel.

2. I really don't like the person (or their idea) but I don't want to get fired over it.

Claude is really great at this: "Other person said X, I think it is stupid and they're a moron for suggesting this. Explain to them why this is a terrible idea or tell me I'm being an idiot."

Sometimes it tells me I'm being an idiot, sometimes it gives me nearly copy-pasta text that I can use and agree with.

> People will be more than willing to say, "Claude, impersonate me and act on my behalf".

I'm now imagining a future where actual people's identities are blacklisted just like some IP addresses are dead to email, and a market develops for people to sell their identity to spammers.

I mean, that's fine I guess as long as its respectable and respects the forum.

"Claude write a summary of the word doc I wrote about x and post it as a reply comment," is fine. I dont see why it wouldnt be. Its a good faith effort to post.

"Claude, post every 10 seconds to reddit to spam people to believe my politics is correct," isn't but that's not the case. Its not a good faith effort.

The moderation rules for 'human slop' will apply to AI too. Try spamming a well moderated reddit and see how far you get, human or AI.

That's fine, because once someone is banned, the impersonations are also banned.