AI-enabled tools have become sophisticated enough to allow a small number of
individuals to run disinformation campaigns of an unprecedented scale.
Privacy-preserving identity attestations can drastically reduce instances of
impersonation and make disinformation easy to identify and potentially hinder.
By understanding how identity attestations are positioned across the spectrum
of decentralization, we can gain a better understanding of the costs and
benefits of various attestations. In this paper, we discuss attestation types,
including governmental, biometric, federated, and web of trust-based, and
include examples such as e-Estonia, China's social credit system, Worldcoin,
OAuth, X (formerly Twitter), Gitcoin Passport, and EAS. We believe that the
most resilient systems create an identity that evolves and is connected to a
network of similarly evolving identities that verify one another. In this type
of system, each entity contributes its respective credibility to the
attestation process, creating a larger, more comprehensive set of attestations.
We believe these systems could be the best approach to authenticating identity
and protecting against some of the threats to democracy that AI can pose in the
hands of malicious actors. However, governments will likely attempt to mitigate
these risks by implementing centralized identity authentication systems; these
centralized systems could themselves pose risks to the democratic processes
they are built to defend. We therefore recommend that policymakers support the
development of standards-setting organizations for identity, provide legal
clarity for builders of decentralized tooling, and fund research critical to
effective identity authentication systems.

人工智能工具可以帮助少数人运行规模空前的虚假信息宣传活动。隐私保护身份证明可以大大减少身份冒用并易于识别和阻止虚假信息。通过了解身份证明在去中心化范围内的定位，我们可以更好地理解各种身份证明的成本和收益。本文讨论了各种身份证明类型，包括政府、生物识别、联邦和信任网络，并提供例如 e-Estonia、中国社会信用系统、Worldcoin、OAuth、X（原名 Twitter）、Gitcoin Passport 和 EAS。我们相信，最有韧性的系统创建了一个随时间演化的身份，并与一组同样演化的身份相连接，相互验证。在这种系统中，每个实体为认证过程贡献了自己的可信度，从而创建了更大更全面的身份证明集合。我们认为这些系统可能是对身份进行认证和防范人工智能可能在恶意操作者手中对民主构成威胁的最佳方式。然而，政府可能会试图通过实施集中身份验证系统来减轻这些风险；这些集中系统本身可能对其所建立的民主过程构成风险。因此，我们建议决策者支持为身份认证制定标准的组织的发展，为去中心化工具构建者提供法律明确性，并为有效的身份认证系统的研究提供资金支持。