What will happen when we can no longer distinguish human tweets from AI tweets? Does it matter? Should we care? Will there be a verified human status?
Renée DiResta, writing for The Atlantic:
Amid the arms race surrounding AI-generated content, users and internet companies will give up on trying to judge authenticity tweet by tweet and article by article. Instead, the identity of the account attached to the comment, or person attached to the byline, will become a critical signal toward gauging legitimacy. Many users will want to know that what they’re reading or seeing is tied to a real person—not an AI-generated persona. . . .
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The idea that a verified identity should be a precondition for contributing to public discourse is dystopian in its own way. Since the dawn of the nation, Americans have valued anonymous and pseudonymous speech: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay used the pen name Publius when they wrote the Federalist Papers, which laid out founding principles of American government. Whistleblowers and other insiders have published anonymous statements in the interest of informing the public. Figures as varied as the statistics guru Nate Silver (“Poblano”) and Senator Mitt Romney (“Pierre Delecto”) have used pseudonyms while discussing political matters on the internet. The goal shouldn’t be to end anonymity online, but merely to reserve the public square for people who exist—not for artificially intelligent propaganda generators.
The Supply of Disinformation Will Soon Be Infinite
The idea that we should reserve the public square for humans is remarkable, in just the sense that this technology is now upon us. Human sentiments have value; AI facsimiles do not.
An optimistic take is that perhaps we will instead pay attention to the useful content of such messages, rather than inflammatory rhetoric. A good idea is a good idea, AI or not.