[jart]

That's what sites like GitHub and Twitter already do. When I push to GitHub it's signed by me. When I tweet about something I did, that's a signature too. Would you like to be bold courageous one who writes a browser extension to block everyone and everything that's anonymous on these services? That's basically your vision. Google tried to make that happen with Google Plus but the service was sadly shut down.

[jillesvangurp]

I've been thinking about such a thing. It wouldn't be hard technically but it seems people are a bit indifferent on this front which makes it hard to pull off from a business point of view. We need some good scandals to get people a bit more paranoid.

Some scandals around LLM generated content could be exactly what we need here. I'm talking reputation damaging scandals that have the likes of the NYT having to explain in public how they messed up so badly and paying millions in damages to the victims. Money is a great way to incentivize companies to level up their game. The the likes of the NYT need to get paranoid about checking authenticity. And everybody else as well.

A few geeks wearing tin foil hats aren't much of a solution. PGP flopped for that reason. But it's not to late for it to make a comeback in some form.

IMHO the Fediverse is an obvious place to start. Why accept any content there that isn't signed? It should be stupidly easy to level up its protocols to add and verify signatures to content and profiles. I've actually considered having a go at it at some point. No time and other priorities. So, I havent. But why isn't this a big topic in the wider community?

[jart]

I doubt there's going to be any such scandals, unless someone creates them. What's going to happen is LLM generated content is going to become so good so fast that you won't want to consume content created by people anymore, and you're going to feel guilty about that. Similar to how people probably feel guilty about playing football video games rather than going outside and playing football. Crypto and authentication services won't help, because people will just give their LLM agents the ability to act autonomously under their identity.