Well it's what we need unfortunately, unless you want to talk to potentially malicious machines and think you're talking to a human. Identity is vitally important for us, the end users interacting with each other. Far more important than it is for nation states and companies, who have always had ways to track us and care more about us in the aggregate than as individuals.

I'm not sure I share your concern about surveillance capitalism - that ship sailed long ago - you are stored in many nation-state and corporate databases under all the aliases, phone numbers, IPs you've ever used. I sincerely doubt your opsec has always been even near good enough to evade this surveillance, it's a little late to start worrying about it now, particularly when there are other concerns.

I'd be more concerned about billionaires spending on bots impersonating humans to sway elections in my local state than a nation state snooping on forum comments and linking them with something else.

Proof of identity is badly needed in order to use the online spaces we've come to know and trust, and time is running out.

Well, surveillance capitalism now has a killer app.

Utilizing terms like surveillance capitalism, doesn’t serve as a useful deterrent, because the underlying system has changed.

Previously Bots were piloted to be marginally effective at appearing to be normal users. With LLMs, that’s basically out of the window.

At this point your false positive detection rate is going to start hitting human users.

Users are also going to accept AI content. Simply because their feeds are going to provide it to them.

It’s cheap, and it achieves the same dopamine hits that human interaction will achieve.

Unless you are knowledgeable in a field, you wouldn’t be able to make out if something is off.

The most likely positive outcome is we see bots that take on bridging roles in conversations.

The question I would ask is why would and who would, pay to verify a user is human ?