# LLMs break the internet. Signing everything fixes it. - Host: [subconscious.substack.com](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/hosts/subconscious.substack.com/) - Saved: April 26, 2023 (2023-04-27T03:33:27Z) - Record: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/38d843646f4a/ - JSON: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/38d843646f4a.json ## What Jamie wrote One of the outcomes of LLMs and Generative AI is that the **cost of content creation will trend to $0.** I’m not saying good content, but content will be readily available for free to fill every nook and cranny. > You thought the internet was a mess before? Get ready for bots that beat the Turing test, [synthesize your voice](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/19/arts/music/ai-drake-the-weeknd-fake.html), generate fake social consensus at scale. We're [seeing](https://twitter.com/d_feldman/status/1649466422018318338) the [beginnings](https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/25/23697218/ai-generated-spam-fake-user-reviews-as-an-ai-language-model) of this already. Expect a tidal wave of spam, identity theft, phishing, ransomware [over the next 36 months](https://twitter.com/DavidSHolz/status/1648763335591223296?s=20). This article pulls from the Fred Wilson article [Sign Everything](https://avc.mirror.xyz/JpTblGUpDMA7SMS6HYdoYgbQE9H_a_wYq330pit_aRU) that I shared previously, but then dives into how this would work and how we can make it happen. Funny enough this is all leveraging PGP and Public Key Cryptography that was created over twenty years ago! This is one of those articles that I read and wish I would have wrote — but I don't think I could have done it was well as Brander! > Centralized approaches to moderation just don't scale. They don't have the [requisite variety](https://subconscious.substack.com/i/37645825/the-infinite-variety-of-universal-machines) to actually moderate. There's a reason we no longer live in castles, after all. Castles only work in the small. Continuing… > The answer to this dilemma was [zero-trust networking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_trust_security_model). Forget the castle wall entirely. Rebuild trust around people. > > We did this with networks. Now it’s time to do the same with sign-ins, authorization, identity, reputation. Sign everything, with [self-sovereign keys](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-sovereign_identity) that only you control. I like so much about this approach, but I think the path forward is slightly different. The approach described here around Web of Trust was tried two decades ago, and it never got traction. Signing public keys and trading them was just too hard. In fact, when I decided to include my signature in each issue of the Weekly Thing I explored using PGP to do that. I ultimately decided that Ethereum was just a much easier way to solve this problem. So many of the ingredients are already there in the Crypto (Web 3) stack. > The combination of open webs-of-trust, reputation, and attestation create the ground conditions for positive-sum collaboration. [Communication between keys becomes a repeated game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma#The_iterated_prisoner's_dilemma). Bad actors get a bad reputation. Free-riding stops working. The winning move becomes win-win cooperation. Ethereum gives us authentication. It has a means of signing. It can be connected to a usable name via ENS. Plus you have the added benefit of an entire blockchain and EVM to build on. The only thing I don't see in Ethereum is the ability to sign another persons public key. However, the same outcome could be achieved by exchanging a POAP or signing a message shared between each other. The path forward to Sign Everything has the most potential in Ethereum, in my opinion. ## Facts - Kind: [Newsletter](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/kinds/newsletter/) ## Appears in - [WT252: Weekly Thing #252 / Elevator, Evidence, Everything](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/252/), Featured ## Saved the same week - [The Many Hats of Product Managers – rajiv.com](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/16ce77b82512/) (rajiv.com, April 26, 2023) - [Botify Expands Executive Team with Appointment of Charley Hackerson as Chief Revenue Officer | Business Wire](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/bd319a02bf96/) (businesswire.com, April 26, 2023) - [The Annual Computer Science Fair - AVC](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/4e2f68eb605e/) (avc.com, April 26, 2023) - [When Pay to Play Doesn’t Pay](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/5821c5116b0f/) (cjchilvers.com, April 26, 2023) - [Founder & CEO is kinda a BS title](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/deda4b4a7d5b/) (world.hey.com, April 26, 2023) ## Elsewhere - Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://subconscious.substack.com/p/llms-break-the-internet-signing-everything