Sam Altman, the man behind Chatgpt and one of the most visible faces in terms of artificial intelligence, has published a message on social networks that has left many somewhat strange.
«I never seriously took the dead Internet theory, but it seems that now there are many Twitter accounts managed by LLM,» he writes. A comment that the only thing he has done is to give rise to a debate with many years of history and that now, curiously, has a lot to do with his own work.
Let’s contextualize. The so -called ‘Dead Internet Theory’ was born in forums in the mid -2010. It states that much of what circulates through the network is no longer generated by people, but algorithms: Comments, memes, false news or ghost accounts created by Bots. It was seen as a conspiracy idea, an exaggeration in times when networks began to be filled with spam.
Over the years, however, This theory seems to be crazy. The massive arrival of great language models such as Chatgpt or Claude, capable of creating authentic follies in seconds, has given a less conspiracy dye to the subject. To this is added the lost battle of platforms such as X against the bots, which seem to multiply faster than they are blocked.
It is no accident that the comment comes just from the OpenAi CEO. The company that Altman directs was the first to launch a massive assistant in 2022. Since then, the amount of content generated by artificial intelligence in blogs, media or false accounts has shot himself, to the point that it is difficult to differentiate the real from the false.
With this as the basis, it was expected that some would be thrown after this comment. «You talk about the dead Internet as if you had nothing to do, when you were the first to flood it with texts created by machines,» said a user. The basis is that if the Internet is empty of humans, it is largely thanks to Openai.
The problem, as cybersecurity experts have already made clear, is trustworthy. If you cannot be sure that behind an account there is someone real, the conversation is lost. And this is precisely the central idea of the ‘dead Internet theory’: the feeling that the Internet has gradually emptied of people to fill with false things.
Sam Altman wants your iris, again: would you let yourself scan your eye to show that you are not an AI?
The paradoxical is that Altman has in his own hands a project that seeks to fight this: Worldcoin, renamed World Network. It is an initiative to give each person a ‘digital humanity test through the scan of the iris. The goal is that, in the future, you can demonstrate that you are a real human on the Internet and differentiate yourself from a bot.
The idea itself is not as crazy as it seems, since, currently, IRIS recognition systems are used in some devices and places with high security needs, such as access controls to sensitive areas. The difference is that Openai CEO proposes to bring this technology to a more everyday level.
But of course, It must be remembered that this project, at the beginning called Worldcoin, generated a stir and many eyebrows rose in Europe.
There were many criticisms and problems related to the privacy of biometric data. People worried that, when scanning their iris, that sensitive information could be stored and, in some cases, it was not protected enough.
Therefore, in Europe many red flags were raised: how would that data be used? Who would have access to them? Would user privacy be violated? These problems caused many to throw back and even rejected the idea, for fear of losing control over their own personal information.
Collection by Business Insider, the director of the AEPD, Mar Spain, asked for young people with WorldCoin: «They do not know that they are giving health data. When they are adults, they will see that it has many consequences. Giving personal data for these ridiculous amounts of money is a short and long term risk.»
The interesting thing about the current proposal is that, learning from the errors of Worldcoin, the focus is being made especially in the protection of privacy and transparency. Today, there is much more talk about how the data will be handled and what measures will be implemented to ensure that no one can misuse that information.
Leaving all this aside, Altman’s comment, then, connects two parts: on the one hand, the recognition that the bots are gaining ground; On the other, the idea that verification systems will be necessary to rescue the human essence of the network.
But what for some is an innovative idea, for others it is an absolute dystopian madness. The doubt now is whether you really want your biometric identity to be the mandatory pass to ‘be real’ on the Internet.
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Tags: Artificial intelligence, software