Do ChatGPT and other AI bots force a rethinking of anonymity?

Question

Many of the posts regarding AI mention the same issue regarding AI Bots: "Online, I can't tell the difference between a human and machine response.

I don't see a solution to this problem that doesn't seriously curtail anonymity on the Internet. A reasonable solution seems to be the forced registration of AI software or the elimination of anonymous Users. Are there philosophical arguments regarding the right of humans to be anonymous?

Edit: By the responses, it's seems the pros of anonymity vastly outweigh the concerns raised by the inability to distinguish between a human and a Bot online. Until there is evidence that this activity is any more detrimental than the standard online human deception, there is nothing broken to fix.

Thanks to all for the thoughtful responses and comments.

Answer 1

Yes, but not in the way your question implies it. Automized language models will provide a huge challenge for anonymity, but likely not because we can't tell them apart, but rather because they are probably able to tell us apart. If you write anything more complex than "yes" or "no" you'll exhibit some sort of style that is unique to you or at least unique within a given context and that persists between different "identities" (online accounts).

So if only 1 of your accounts is linked to your identity or if you have enough linked accounts or data within an account, one can probably harvest enough information about you to make a profile about who you are. And either that already links to a person or is enough information to scan various databases and networks and find the person that fits. If you have enough parameters everyone is unique.

On the other hand it might become increasingly hard to even verify that you are a person. I mean how would you do that? Upload a picture? Deep fake! Upload a blood sample? Just search google scholar for how these look like and fake one! Social Security numbers? Would you want that to be public? You could make a registry that links names and tokens and confirms them. And a bot net could take an common name and brute force a bunch of numbers till it fits.

Everything needs to be digitized in order for easy sharing and accessing and everything that is digitized can be forged.

Answer 2

I think it was always quite a naive assumption that internet posting is a fair reflection of a public voice.

Computing is a technology, and the online voice has always reflected the perspectives of those in possession of that technical capability, whether the original ARPAnet or the global middle class utopia of Tumblr.

What we’re seeing now is a different take on this, in that governance of that voice is shaped much more directly by the construction and use of large language models, but the principle is very much the same:

Everyone is a dog on the internet.

Answer 3

The question we're facing isn't just about distinguishing between silicon and flesh, or between the creations of our machines and our own creations. It's a question about the nature of identity, about the right to speak and to be heard, and about the balance between transparency and anonymity.

There are those who argue for forced registration of AI or the elimination of anonymous users. On the surface, these might seem like reasonable solutions. But we must be wary of any solution that requires us to cede more control to authorities, or that infringes on our rights to speak freely and anonymously.

Anonymity, after all, can be a shield for the persecuted, a cloak for whistleblowers, a necessary disguise for those living under repressive regimes. It's easy to forget, amidst our comfortable debates about AI and identity, that for some people, anonymity is a matter of life and death.

Answer 4

Privacy activist Edward Snowden once said:

Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.

Perhaps you don't need anonymity. Perhaps you are OK with everyone being able to attribute everything you write on the Internet to you. But not everyone might be OK with that. For example:

• They live under an oppressive regime that punishes them for speaking out against it.
• They are afraid they might one day live under an oppressive regime that will get rid of people who showed disagreement with their agenda in the past.
• They live in a society where certain views are shunned and lead to social ostracism.
• They want to publish information that is important for people to know, but which other people might want to remain secret. And those people might be able to retaliate against the speaker.
• They want to share experiences about things that are embarrassing to them.

Without anonymity, those people would not be able to do any of these things. Which is not just bad for them, but also bad for you, because you have less useful information and less diverse viewpoints available which allow you to make sense of the world around you.

Answer 5

Are there philosophical arguments regarding the right of humans to be anonymous?

Certainly, but like many things, they raise just as many questions as they answer. I'll focus on the ethics for or against a right of anonymity.

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Under Kantian ethics, we'd look at universibility, and ask if it's logically possible to live in any of the following worlds:

• A world where no one has privacy. Everyone knows everything about everyone else. What they did, what they want, what they are planning to do.

• A world where everyone has perfect privacy. People are unidentifiable and completely interchangeable.

• A world where everyone has some parts of their lives that are public and other parts that are private. Some of their actions are known publicly, and others are anonymous.

After some thought, I think none of those lead to logical contradictions. So, we wouldn't have a perfect duty to follow one course over another.

But, do we have an Imperfect Duty? Are any of those logical worlds, a world that we would not like to live in? A subjective preference of humankind?

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Under Contracturalism, you might have a right to anonymity because we've agreed to it, to make society a good place for us all. But, if the situation changes, you might just need to change the contract. So, if we all agree to give up anonymity, then that's the right thing.

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With Utilitarianism or Consequentialism, you'd have to ask whether the world is actually a better place with human anonymity? or without it? Is there more suffering? (more bias against minorities? identity theft? lying?) or more pleasure? (truth, trust).

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Or under virtue ethics, you'd have to ask whether doing things anonymously (occasionally? or all the time?) is a good character trait. Is it good to be a person that gives to the poor anonymously? or is it okay to give to the poor even if everyone knows who you are and what you are doing?

Answer 6

This is less about the philosophical aspects and more about getting the practical aspects right, because it's not immediately clear to me that the possibilities you sketch are the only ones.

First of all, in some cases it's not a problem if a user might be a bot, for example if all that that user is doing is reading others' content (assuming there's no problem with that content being scraped by a bot). So in this case we can still have anonymity. But I think what you have in mind is settings where this isn't the case, for example because the user is creating content such as text and we don't want bot-created text.

Now it may still be possible to have effective CAPTCHAs (perhaps relying on hard vision problems) to verify that users are humans. Perhaps those humans would post text that is generated by ChatGPT, but at that point humans are choosing to submit that specific content, so that may not be a problem.

Perhaps at some point AI is good enough that there are no longer any effective CAPTCHAs. At that point, it would not be possible to (automatically) tell humans from bots based on their behavior. In principle, one might yet have constructions such as "trusted humanity verifiers" -- i.e., trusted organizations that check that someone is a human being (perhaps the human needs to show up in person at the organization) without recording identifying information about that human, and then through the trusted organization the human is allowed to post content while still having anonymity.

Answer 7

I do not see any advanced AI tools as a particularly serious threat to anonymity in online communications. We are well past that phase in the war on misinformation.

You seem to be concerned by the use of chatbots as tool for [political] propaganda, but it is Facebook, not 4chan that is the primary target for such large-scale campaigns. It is relatively trivial for state-level actors to fabricate online identities. Thus, placing citizens under strict online control would be truly Orwellian, all while troll farms would still thrive (and there's nothing to prevent a given government from recruiting actual, verifiable humans to post online!).

Trust is a core feature of human social interaction. Yet, it is easily exploitable, and one does not need advanced AI for that: stories of con men are countless, and modern media has mastered the art of clickbait. What differentiates AI from human writers is productivity and feasibility to mass-target a people exploiting their specific fears and desires... But I would argue that if someone habitually takes the bait, sooner or later they would fall prey to much cruder approaches anyway.

I am Russian, and I have friends, relatives and colleagues exposed to both sides of political propaganda with mixed results. The main differentiator between those who easily fall to things akin to QAnon conspiracies and those who don't is critical thinking. And a bit of digital hygiene, too, I suppose.

In this regard, the rapid progress in LLMs is merely a part of a broader issue that is ethics of social media and algorithmic recommendations. If the key metric is user engagement with the platform, how much is left of free will? Do people exercise it when following Siri's recommendations of what to have for dinner, what to wear, and how to spend their weekends? The humanity has fought hard to bear the burden of responsibility for one is choices and the freedom to make them; now it is given away without much of a fight.

Going on a bit of a tangent here, but one other major thing we have lost since the Cold War, albeit not entirely, is the trust in public institutions and science/engineering as a whole. It would be much, much easier to fight misinformation online if people would refer to several authoritative, institutional sources instead of going with what their online friend pete93 has to tell them. After all, pete93 had a stunt 2 years ago working as janitor in NASA, they could not possibly be wrong!

Jokes aside, the main ethical question regarding misinformation online has to do with responsibility, and in my humble view, the part of the burden the general public can't bear should be squarely placed on public institutions with maximal transparency. More importantly, said general public has to accept more responsibility for being deceived than it does right now: it may be a malicious actor who sought to exploit you, and you might rightfully be wishing to live in a safe world where it does not happen... But this is simply not the case right now, and it hardly ever was throughout the history.

In short,

Things that help creating and spreading misinformation online:

• AI
• Conspiracy theorists
• Lack of education

Things that help fighting misinformation:

• Critical thinking
• Transparency
• Trust in public institutions

Things that do not help fighting misinformation:

• Biometric IDs online
• Thought policing

As @haxor798 has hinted at, linking every single account makes targeting people online actually easier, which, I would argue, would only serve propaganda makers, harassers and trolls. There is little to gain and a lot to lose here.

In contrast, providing better informational infrastructure, educating the public on matters of misinformation online and digital hygiene might alleviate the issue. After Montessori, I must repeat - "Establishing lasting peace is the work of education". And so is establishing safety.

Answer 8

I'm more bothered (maybe not just perplexed) by humans pretending to be humans they are not, than robots pretending to be human, and yet see no reason to demand that humans prove they have e.g. read Spinoza, before answering a question on Spinoza.

There's a difference between manipulation and anonymity in general (these bots are representing someone). What matters - IMHO - is less that we know which interactions are human than openness about why some of our interactions are not human. I probably have read Popper on the open society, but it's not limited to right wing capitalists (there was an 'Open Marxism' even).

Karl Popper defined the open society as one "in which an individual is confronted with personal decisions"

An attitude to institutions whereby we rationally decide their consequences for ourselves and our persons: presumably - though this is the key point I'm making - it's impossible if we don't know what other parts of society do (closed societies are tribal or seamless biological like entities).

Anyway, how can we struggle with and judge other individuals, and their ideas, in a society in which we don't know how they act or their moral attitudes?

Investor and philanthropist George Soros, a self-described follower of Karl Popper" [claimed]... "Politicians will respect, rather than manipulate, reality only if the public cares about the truth and punishes politicians when it catches them in deliberate deception."

It doesn't take a genius to notice that large scale deceptions are more likely in a closed society, and presumably if we care about the truth we want to know why we are or have been tricked (wellness aside).