The web faces a critical inflection point: as AI-generated content proliferates and platforms demand increasingly invasive identity verification, we risk creating a digital environment where every interaction requires credentials—essentially a "papers, please" culture for the internet. This talk and panel examine how privacy-preserving approaches to personhood verification could help prevent this dystopian outcome while still enabling necessary trust.
The talk will begin with the introduction and evolution of the "Personhood" concept and the tradeoffs associated with different implementations, including the recently published Personhood Credentials paper, which introduces a framework for verifying humanity while preserving privacy. We'll explore new technical developments enabling novel approaches.
