What's the grift here, get as much voluntary biometric data as possible before regulatory pressure shuts the whole thing down?
It's simply pretending that language models masquerading as AI are so absurdly powerful that human identity itself is now threatened and requires an additional verification layer to prove that you are actually human. Like the language model product, I think they're purely trading on hype.
I'm not sure what having my retinal scan gets you if you can't actually replicate an eyeball matching that scan.
The rise of LLM and generative image and video absolutely poses threats in the form of criminal impersonation and scams, in terms of maliciously intentioned catfishing, in terms of manipulation of public discourse, and last but not least to the enshittification of online discussion.
Online discussion spam filters have been decent at removing low effort commercial shilling and automated trollposting, but LLM poses a real threat in that regard. If you don't want a 14 year old troll to be able to set an automated script to spam post 50 new convincingly written Reddit posts every hour about how horrible Playstation 7 is and how much better Xbox Series 15 is to /r/Games, then you care about human verification or spam detection that takes into account the new abilities of LLMs.
All that being said Worldcoin doesn't look like the best answer.
LLMs are going to shift the orbit of the internet and present a spam-adjacent problem on a scale we haven't seen before. Existing power structures are going to be very suddenly convinced of the need to either prove one's identity, or at a minimum, prove one's humanity and uniqueness.
I have no idea what the solution here is but man I hope it's not a fricken crypto currency and maybe also not exploiting the 3rd world. These seem like they should be low bars but here we are.
- wouldn't need a blockchain or crypto tokens for that.
- but they would need to provide a way for people to authenticate as humans on random website (without reavealing their identities, because GDPR in the EU).
Since they do 1 but not 2, we can positively conclude that Altman take avantage of a real problem as a marketing pitch for his product that isn't in fact aimed at this problem.
Matching finger print data with facial recog is about as close as you can get to foolproof identity analysis I would think. I know both can be faked, but for a majority of the population, having these two markers would be almost impossible to claim it wasn't you.
With a sufficiently large number of samples, the ability to create convincing synthetic retinal images? Though to what end I don't know.
[edit] The last time I was at Universal Studios, I was 17. A couple friends and I spent a few hours running around the park in camouflage at around 1am, stoned out of our minds, before being caught and escorted out. They let us go with a warning. Can you imagine what they'd do now?? The 90s were awesome.
How are biometrics used at Universal Studios Hollywood?
Biometrics are gathered on a guest’s first visit when using Multi-Day, Annual Pass or Season Pass tickets. On subsequent visits these biometrics are referenced to ensure that it is the same guest using the ticket.Presumably it would be distributed as Worldcoin airdrops. Either those airdrops will quickly reduce the value of the coin towards zero because nobody’s going to trade real money for WorldHyperInflationCoin…
Or, Sam Altman will somehow create Worldgov too that will fund this brave new Worldcoin UBI. Doesn’t seem terribly likely.
Maybe it’s an AI Underpants Gnome thing where step #2 is “posthuman superintelligence will solve it!”
Any coin used for UBI, will lose value against Bitcoin.
And I doubt that many people exactly know what they give and what happens to that data or what negative effects it could have if that data is stolen.
Otherwise people wouldn't fall for (crypto) scams.