MIT News
Q: Why do we need certificates confirming our personality?
Tobin South: AI capabilities are improving rapidly. While much of the public discussion has been about how chatbots are getting better, advanced AI enables much more than just better ChatGPT, such as the ability for AI to interact autonomously online. AI could have the ability to create accounts, post content, generate imitation content, impersonate people online, or algorithmically amplify content on a massive scale. This unlocks a host of threats. This can be seen as a “digital impostor” problem, where it becomes increasingly challenging to distinguish advanced AI from humans. Persona credentials are one potential solution to this problem.
Nour Soliman: Such advanced AI capabilities could aid bad actors launch large-scale attacks or spread disinformation. The internet could be filled with AIs that share content from real people to conduct disinformation campaigns. It will become increasingly challenging to navigate the internet, and social media in particular. You can imagine using personality credentials to filter certain content and moderate content on your social media feed, or to determine how trustworthy the information you receive online is.
Q: What is legal personality certification and how can its security be guaranteed?
South: Persona credentials allow you to prove that you are a human without revealing anything else about your identity. These credentials allow you to get information from an entity like the government that can guarantee that you are a human, and then using privacy technology, they allow you to prove that fact without sharing any sensitive information about your identity. To get a persona credential, you will have to show up in person or have a relationship with the government, such as a taxpayer identification number. There is an offline component. You will have to do something that only humans can do. For example, AIs cannot show up at a transit agency. And even the most advanced AIs cannot forge or break cryptography. So we combine two ideas—the security that we have through cryptography and the fact that humans still have some capabilities that AIs do not—to create really solid guarantees that you are a human.
Soliman: But personality credentials can be optional. Service providers can let people choose whether to employ them or not. Right now, if people only want to interact with real, verified people online, there’s no reasonable way to do that. And beyond creating content and talking to people, at some point AI agents will also take actions on behalf of people. If I’m going to buy something online or negotiate a contract, then maybe I want to make sure that I’m interacting with entities that have personality credentials, to make sure that they’re trustworthy.
South: Personality credentials build on the infrastructure and set of security technologies we have used for decades, such as using identifiers like email addresses to log in to online services, and can complement these existing methods.
Q: What are the risks associated with having legal personality and how can they be circumscribed?
Soliman: One risk is the way that personality credentials are implemented. There is a concern about the concentration of power. Let’s say that one particular entity is the sole issuer, or the system is designed in such a way that all power is given to one entity. This can raise a lot of concerns for a part of the population – maybe they don’t trust that entity and don’t feel it’s sheltered to interact with it. We need to implement personality credentials in a way that people trust the issuers and ensure that people’s identities remain completely isolated from their personality credentials to maintain privacy.
South: If the only way to get a persona credential is to physically go somewhere to prove you are human, that can be scary if you are in a socio-political environment where it is challenging or unsafe to go to that place. This can prevent some people from sharing their messages online in an unfettered way, which can limit freedom of speech. That is why it is critical to have multiple entities issuing persona credentialing and an open protocol to ensure that freedom of speech is preserved.
Soliman: Our article attempts to encourage governments, policymakers, leaders, and researchers to invest more resources in personality credentials. We suggest that researchers explore different avenues for implementation and examine the broader impact that personality credentials can have on society. We need to make sure that we create the right policies and rules for how personality credentials are implemented.
South: AI is evolving very quickly, certainly much faster than the rate at which governments are adapting. It is time for governments and gigantic companies to start thinking about how they can adapt their digital systems to be ready to prove that someone is a human, but in a way that protects privacy and is secure, so that we can be ready when we get to a future where AI has these advanced capabilities.