Proving you are human will be very important in the age of AI

Personhood credentials can verify our humanness and protect us from AI-driven fraud without compromising our privacy

- SRIKANTH NADHAMUNI

Do you know if the person talking to you on Zoom or a dating app is a real human? Or is it an AI agent pretending to be one? This is becoming an increasingly pressing concern as artificial intelligence (AI) advances in its ability to mimic human behaviour. Financial fraud in India is rising rapidly; now, fraudsters can potentially deploy AI agents to defraud thousands simultaneously through automated AI-generated calls and convincing human-like conversations.

The key question in the age of AI is: How do you prove you are human online? The traditional methods of distinguishing between humans and AI bots online, like the familiar CAPTCHA tests that require users to identify a string of blurry letters, are becoming ineffective. Artificial intelligence has already cracked CAPTCHA: short for 'Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart'.

Similarly, websites that require extensive personal information for verification are not the way forward either, as they compromise user privacy. We need a solution that balances security with privacy protection, ensuring that we interact with real people without asking them to disclose personal data.

I recently co-authored a paper with a brilliant group of artificial intelligence researchers from OpenAI, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Microsoft and other institutions titled, 'Personhood Credentials: Artificial Intelligence and the Value of Privacy-Preserving Tools to Distinguish Who is Real Online.' (bit.ly/4k3TKVc).

In this paper, we explore the concept of 'personhood credentials' (PHCs), which are digital credentials designed to verify, in a non-repudiable manner, that an online user is a real person rather than an AI bot at the point of a transaction or an interaction.