The opening moments of the 1982 film Blade Runner introduce viewers to a world of artificially intelligent beings that are “virtually identical” to humans. To tell man from machine, people rely on something called the Voight-Kampff test, which is a little like a polygraph; robot irises exhibit subtle tells when prompted. If you’re dealing with a robot, you’ll know by the eyes.
If Sam Altman has his way, this could be sort of how it works in real life. Last week, he announced an expansion of the verification service World ID, created by a start-up called Tools for Humanity. Altman co-founded the company in 2019, the same year he became CEO of OpenAI. Onstage last Friday, he described the product as a way to certify personhood in a digital landscape rife with bots, deepfakes, phishers, and other sorts of impostors. Think of it as an evolution of CAPTCHA, the security program used to identify bots and prevent attacks on websites. To verify your humanness and secure a World ID, you must stare into a white, frosted orb and allow the company to take pictures of your face and eyeballs…
The foregoing is excerpted from a recent article in The Atlantic. Commenters were not amused.
__________pchapin
This technology completely fails in the face of sock puppetry. It only proves that a human was present when the iris scan was made, not that a human is present at the time of the transaction.
Imagine a bad actor who pays a desperately poor person for their iris scan. For, say, $100, that poor person might be able to buy food for their family for weeks. They might not understand the significance of the scan or care about it. For only $10,000, the bad actor can now amass an "army" of sock puppets online using the iris scans of people who will never be online.
The system completely fails to provide the assurance that it claims to provide, and is therefore useless.
DarkHorse
not a chance I’m letting Altman’s tech scan my eyeballs
DrakX316
I honestly struggled to tell if this was satire.
JamesB
So let me get this straight. Mr. Altman creates a world where we can’t trust our own ears and eyes, and then wants me to surrender what’s left of my identity. Just to prove who I am to him?
No. You can’t have that.
Cynthiajay
A 'World ID' ... dear me. Sam Altman apparently doesn't read his history.
Americans were once fiercely opposed to any such thing as a national ID.
Whatever are we to think of this?
steve207144
The test in Blade Runner tested emotional responses to various scenarios. A tortoise is lying upside down in a desert, you won't help it, why? Since the replicants in Blade Runner were emotionally immature, they could be detected by their extreme response.
Given what I've heard about Sam Altman, I would think he would have no emotional response to others suffering, because he seems to be a sociopath.
I wouldn't trust him with my excrement. Never mind all kinds of bio-metric information and an app tracking me on my smartphone.
Knowing if someone on the internet is human, a dog, a bot, or an AI is a problem, but Sam Altman, and the other tech bros, aren't the solution.
rodeoairflow
Literally, it’s actually only a problem for people who want to extract money from the rest of us. If a terminator is bearing down on me, I’m not going to have the time to ask him to gaze into an orb. And otherwise I couldn’t care less if you’re a human, honestly. Do you.
Cynthiajay
He's just another oligarch.
Zuckerberg. Bezos. Musk. Just remember all of them clustered around the dais at trump's inauguration.
What more do we need to know?
brian99jordan
Story left out that Altman ran a Worldcoin huge scam in Kenya. It was found to be illegal for scamming underage children to provide valuable, sensitive biomedical data. Incredibly naive to let this scammer record your eye-print. Altman does not have an honest, non-hustler bone in his body.
pdstolen
For many years, in government and after while volunteering, I used—sometimes quite effectively—the original purpose of the federal environmental review laws. Simply, the purpose was to determine both the positive and downside effects of human efforts affecting the environment as well as human life. (That law has been deeply degrading and the original purpose essential lost in the shuffle.
My point is this: there is a huge amount of money and effort being spent on the supposed positive effects of various technology—while there is essentially little available for looking at the negative effects. I learned this early on, as we desperately tried to describe the negatives. Now here, you pathetically see the proponent of the positives coming out with supposed solutions to the negatives. No, no no….not at all at what is needed.
Slight
I just can't wait to see whether this will catch on and the all the conspiracy theories begin surrounding it. Meanwhile, I will take a hard pass.
rodeoairflow
I’m so freaked out by the description of this technology that it’s difficult for me to understand how anyone could recognize it as anything other than malicious.
Zobi44
The article was way to blasé about it
malloryt
Brave New World is our new reality.
renegaderosie
Anyone feel the Borg coming for us?
Spectato
Wait, so first you verify that you are human by looking into an orb. And then a token confirming that you are human is stored on your phone. And now the AI agent on your phone can prove online that it's human. Did I get that right?
bookerloo66
Who cares?
malloryt
People who care about unethical market manipulation, violation of privacy rights, and being forced to pay for things that should be optional.
It is like a pharmaceutical company inventing a disease so they can sell an antidote.
Or a pest control company releasing a colony of termites in a newly constructed housing development, then offering to exterminate them.
Or creating a tax system so complex most Americans have to hire a CPA or pay for an online DIY tax prep service to file their tax return.
Altman made AI that is used to create false identities that aid in completing fraudulent activities, then he developed a fee-based service that can spot AI fakes.
For now, this human-verification process is “free” to users. But I would bet that eventually that cost will wind up being paid by the consumer. Perhaps a subscription fee or service charge, or an increase in the cost of goods because the store has to pay for the services Altman is providing.
brian99jordan
Altman’s entire career is marked with scams and dishonest, unethical business practices. If he were not protected by the elites he would be in jail.
jo_snover
I have used both Zoom and DocuSign and would like to be able to continue to do so.
I don't want to provide biometric data to a for-profit company run by a man with no ethical compass (Sam Altman) in order to do it. I'm not sure who/what I would trust, but never Sam Altman. Once given, you can't get this data back or control its use
IadmirePublius
(Edited)
Absolutely unacceptable that they would require me to allow them to ID me that way. Captcha is already bad enough the way it regularly presents me with pictures too fuzzy for me to see even with my glasses on. It discriminates against visually handicapped. It should be illegal already.
Murray
I’m really quite surprised the author was so willing to provide a private corporation with rather dubious ethics a copy of his most private, personal biometric information.
Once you’ve given up biometrics the threat of identity theft backed by that data rises very significantly, and the value of hacking a database containing millions of peoples’ biometrics is almost inconceivable. Armed with a copy of your irises anyone could become you. Encrypted? Should anyone trust that in encryption in 2026? 2030? And I’d also assume systems using this data pass tokens rather than the actual data so having the ability to create those tokens represents the same threat.
I’d say that threat comes from malicious actors, which now includes AIs run by malicious actors, but I’m hardly convinced Altman himself is to be trusted. Much less Musk. Much less an authoritarian government. They all desperately want our biometrics and want to create situations where we are either incentivised or forced to do so. Don’t give it to them.
ForTheBirds
I was going to make a similar comment about the risks of giving biometric information to these companies. It’s likely to make it easier to use your information by AI.
Hmthinkingaboutthis
My thoughts as well. Why on earth would you give up your biometrics. It's your final "password"
The opening moments of the 1982 film Blade Runner introduce viewers to a world of artificially intelligent beings that are “virtually identical” to humans. To tell man from machine, people rely on something called the Voight-Kampff test, which is a little like a polygraph; robot irises exhibit subtle tells when prompted. If you’re dealing with a robot, you’ll know by the eyes.
If Sam Altman has his way, this could be sort of how it works in real life. Last week, he announced an expansion of the verification service World ID, created by a start-up called Tools for Humanity. Altman co-founded the company in 2019, the same year he became CEO of OpenAI. Onstage last Friday, he described the product as a way to certify personhood in a digital landscape rife with bots, deepfakes, phishers, and other sorts of impostors. Think of it as an evolution of CAPTCHA, the security program used to identify bots and prevent attacks on websites. To verify your humanness and secure a World ID, you must stare into a white, frosted orb and allow the company to take pictures of your face and eyeballs…
__________
pchapin
This technology completely fails in the face of sock puppetry. It only proves that a human was present when the iris scan was made, not that a human is present at the time of the transaction.
Imagine a bad actor who pays a desperately poor person for their iris scan. For, say, $100, that poor person might be able to buy food for their family for weeks. They might not understand the significance of the scan or care about it. For only $10,000, the bad actor can now amass an "army" of sock puppets online using the iris scans of people who will never be online.
The system completely fails to provide the assurance that it claims to provide, and is therefore useless.
DarkHorse
not a chance I’m letting Altman’s tech scan my eyeballs
DrakX316
I honestly struggled to tell if this was satire.
JamesB
So let me get this straight. Mr. Altman creates a world where we can’t trust our own ears and eyes, and then wants me to surrender what’s left of my identity. Just to prove who I am to him?
No. You can’t have that.
Cynthiajay
A 'World ID' ... dear me. Sam Altman apparently doesn't read his history.
Americans were once fiercely opposed to any such thing as a national ID.
Whatever are we to think of this?
steve207144
The test in Blade Runner tested emotional responses to various scenarios. A tortoise is lying upside down in a desert, you won't help it, why? Since the replicants in Blade Runner were emotionally immature, they could be detected by their extreme response.
Given what I've heard about Sam Altman, I would think he would have no emotional response to others suffering, because he seems to be a sociopath.
I wouldn't trust him with my excrement. Never mind all kinds of bio-metric information and an app tracking me on my smartphone.
Knowing if someone on the internet is human, a dog, a bot, or an AI is a problem, but Sam Altman, and the other tech bros, aren't the solution.
rodeoairflow
Literally, it’s actually only a problem for people who want to extract money from the rest of us. If a terminator is bearing down on me, I’m not going to have the time to ask him to gaze into an orb. And otherwise I couldn’t care less if you’re a human, honestly. Do you.
Cynthiajay
He's just another oligarch.
Zuckerberg. Bezos. Musk. Just remember all of them clustered around the dais at trump's inauguration.
What more do we need to know?
brian99jordan
Story left out that Altman ran a Worldcoin huge scam in Kenya. It was found to be illegal for scamming underage children to provide valuable, sensitive biomedical data. Incredibly naive to let this scammer record your eye-print. Altman does not have an honest, non-hustler bone in his body.
pdstolen
For many years, in government and after while volunteering, I used—sometimes quite effectively—the original purpose of the federal environmental review laws. Simply, the purpose was to determine both the positive and downside effects of human efforts affecting the environment as well as human life. (That law has been deeply degrading and the original purpose essential lost in the shuffle.
My point is this: there is a huge amount of money and effort being spent on the supposed positive effects of various technology—while there is essentially little available for looking at the negative effects. I learned this early on, as we desperately tried to describe the negatives. Now here, you pathetically see the proponent of the positives coming out with supposed solutions to the negatives. No, no no….not at all at what is needed.
Slight
I just can't wait to see whether this will catch on and the all the conspiracy theories begin surrounding it. Meanwhile, I will take a hard pass.
rodeoairflow
I’m so freaked out by the description of this technology that it’s difficult for me to understand how anyone could recognize it as anything other than malicious.
Zobi44
The article was way to blasé about it
malloryt
Brave New World is our new reality.
renegaderosie
Anyone feel the Borg coming for us?
Spectato
Wait, so first you verify that you are human by looking into an orb. And then a token confirming that you are human is stored on your phone. And now the AI agent on your phone can prove online that it's human. Did I get that right?
bookerloo66
Who cares?
malloryt
People who care about unethical market manipulation, violation of privacy rights, and being forced to pay for things that should be optional.
It is like a pharmaceutical company inventing a disease so they can sell an antidote.
Or a pest control company releasing a colony of termites in a newly constructed housing development, then offering to exterminate them.
Or creating a tax system so complex most Americans have to hire a CPA or pay for an online DIY tax prep service to file their tax return.
Altman made AI that is used to create false identities that aid in completing fraudulent activities, then he developed a fee-based service that can spot AI fakes.
For now, this human-verification process is “free” to users. But I would bet that eventually that cost will wind up being paid by the consumer. Perhaps a subscription fee or service charge, or an increase in the cost of goods because the store has to pay for the services Altman is providing.
brian99jordan
Altman’s entire career is marked with scams and dishonest, unethical business practices. If he were not protected by the elites he would be in jail.
jo_snover
I have used both Zoom and DocuSign and would like to be able to continue to do so.
I don't want to provide biometric data to a for-profit company run by a man with no ethical compass (Sam Altman) in order to do it. I'm not sure who/what I would trust, but never Sam Altman. Once given, you can't get this data back or control its use
IadmirePublius
(Edited)
Absolutely unacceptable that they would require me to allow them to ID me that way. Captcha is already bad enough the way it regularly presents me with pictures too fuzzy for me to see even with my glasses on. It discriminates against visually handicapped. It should be illegal already.
Murray
I’m really quite surprised the author was so willing to provide a private corporation with rather dubious ethics a copy of his most private, personal biometric information.
Once you’ve given up biometrics the threat of identity theft backed by that data rises very significantly, and the value of hacking a database containing millions of peoples’ biometrics is almost inconceivable. Armed with a copy of your irises anyone could become you. Encrypted? Should anyone trust that in encryption in 2026? 2030? And I’d also assume systems using this data pass tokens rather than the actual data so having the ability to create those tokens represents the same threat.
I’d say that threat comes from malicious actors, which now includes AIs run by malicious actors, but I’m hardly convinced Altman himself is to be trusted. Much less Musk. Much less an authoritarian government. They all desperately want our biometrics and want to create situations where we are either incentivised or forced to do so. Don’t give it to them.
ForTheBirds
I was going to make a similar comment about the risks of giving biometric information to these companies. It’s likely to make it easier to use your information by AI.
Hmthinkingaboutthis
My thoughts as well. Why on earth would you give up your biometrics. It's your final "password"
LEON
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