Abstracts: August 15, 2024

Key Takeaways

welcome to abstracts a Microsoft research podcast that puts the spotlight on worldclass Research in brief I'm Amber tingle in this series members of the research community at Microsoft give us a quick snapshot or a podcast abstract of their new and noteworthy papers our guests today are shre jam and Zoe HCK shre is a product manager at Microsoft and Zoe is a research scientist at open AI they are two of the corresponding authors on a new paper personhood credentials artificial intelligence and the value of privacy preserving tools to distinguish who is real online this exploratory research comprises multi-disciplinary collaborators from across industry academ IA and the Civil sector the paper is available now on archive shy and Zoe thank you so much for joining us and welcome back to the Microsoft research podcast thank you we're happy to be back shy let's start with a brief overview of your paper why is this research important and why do you think this is something we should all know about malicious actors have been exploiting anonymity as a way to deceive others online and historically ception has been viewed as this unfortunate but necessary cost as a way to preserve the internet's commitment to privacy and unrestricted access to information and today AI is changing the way we should think about malicious actor's ability to be successful in those attacks it makes it easier to create content that is indistinguishable from Human created content and it is possible to do so in a way that is only getting cheaper and more accessible and so this paper aims to address a countermeasure to protect against AI power deception at scale while also protecting privacy and I think the reason why people should care about this problem is for two reasons one is it can very soon become very logistically annoying to deal with these various different types of scams that can occur I think we've all been susceptible to different types of attacks or scams that you know people have had but now these scams are going to much more persuasive and effective and so for various different recovery purposes it can become very challenging to get access back to your accounts or rebuild your reputation that someone may damage online but more importantly there's also very dangerous things that can happen kids might not be safe online anymore or ability to communicate online for Democratic processes a lot of the way in which we shape political views today happens online and that's also at risk and in response to that we propose in this paper a solution titled personhood credentials personhood credentials enable people to prove that they are in fact a real person without revealing anything more about themselves online Zoe walk us through what's already been done in this field and what's your unique contribution to the literature here I see us as intervening on two separate bodies of work and part of what we're doing in this paper is bringing together those two bodies of work there's been absolutely amazing work for decades in cryptography and insecurity and what cryptographers have been able to do is to figure out protocols that allow people to prove very specific claims about themselves without revealing their full identity so when you think about walking into a bar and the bartender asks you to prove that you're over 21 or over 18 depending on where you are you typically have to show your full driver's license and now that's revealing a lot of information it says you know where you live whether you're an organ donor it's revealing a lot of information to that bartender and online we don't know what different service providers are storing about us so you know the bartender might not really care where we live or whether we're in organ donor but when we're signing up for Digital Services and we have to show a highly revealing credential like a driver's license just to get access to something we're giving over too much information in some sense and so this one body of literature that we're really drawing on is a literature in cryptography the idea that I was talking about there where you can prove privately just is Rel ated claims about yourself that's an idea called an anonymous credential it allows you to be anonymous with respect to some kind of service provider while still proving a limited Claim about yourself like I am over 18 or in the case of personhood credentials you prove I am a person so that's all one body of literature then there's this huge other body of literature and set of conversations happening in policy circles right now around what to do about AI huge questions abounding Trey and I have written a prior paper called contextual confidence and generative AI which we talked about on this podcast as well and in that paper we offered a framework for thinking about the specific ways that generative AI sort of threatens the foundations of our modes of Communication online and we outlined about 16 different solutions that could help us to solve the coming problems that generative AI might bring to our online ecosystems and what we decided to do in this paper was focus on a set of solutions that we thought are not getting enough attention in those Ai and AI policy circles and so part of what this paper is doing is bringing together these ideas from this long body of work in cryptography into those conversations I'd like to know more about your methodology shre how did your team go about conducting This research so we had a wide range of collaborators from industry Academia the Civil sector who work on topics of digital identity privacy advocacy security and AI policy which came together to think about what is the clearest way in which we can explain what we believe is a countermeasure that can protect against AI power deception that from a technological point of view there's already a large body of work that we can reference but from a how this can be implemented discussing the trade-offs that various different types of academics and Industry leaders are thinking about can we communicate that very clearly and so the methodology here was really about bringing together a wide range of collaborators to really Bridge those these two bodies of work together and communicated clearly not just the Technical Solutions but also the tradeoffs so Zoe what are the major findings here and how are they presented in the paper I am an economist by training economists love to talk about tradeoffs you know when you have some of this it means you have a little bit less of that it's kind of like the whole business of economics and a key finding of the paper as I it is that we begin with what feels like a tradeoff which is on the one hand as shy was saying we want to be able to be anonymous online because that has great benefits it means we can speak truth to power it means we can protect civil liberties and invite everyone into online spaces you know privacy is a core feature of the internet and at the same time the kind of other side of the tradeoff that were often presented is well if you want all that privacy and anonymity it means that you can't have accountability there's no way of tracking down the Bad actors and making sure that they don't do something bad again we're presented with this tradeoff between anonymity on the one hand and accountability on the other hand all all that is to say a key finding of this paper as I see it is that personhood credentials and more generally this class of anonymous credentials that allow you to prove different pieces of your identity online without revealing your entire identity actually allow you to evade the tradeoff and allow you to in some sense have your cake and eat it too what it allows us to do is to create some accountability to put back some way of tracing people's digital activities to an accountable entity what we also present in the paper are a number of different sort of key challenges that will have to be taken into account in building any kind of system like this but we present all of that all of those challenges going forward as potentially very worth grappling with because of the potential for this sort of idea to allow us to preserve the internet's commitment to privacy free speech and anonymity while also creating accountability for har so Zoe mentioned some of these tradeoffs let's talk a little bit more about realworld impact stray who benefits most from this work I think there's many different people that benefit one is anyone who's communicating or doing anything online and that they can have more confidence in their interactions and it kind of builds back on the paper that Zoe and I wrote last year on contextual confidence in generative AI which is that we want to have confidence in our interactions and in order to do that one component is being able to identify who you're speaking with and also doing it in a privacy preserving way and I think another person who benefits is policy makers I think today when we think about the language and technologies that are being promoted this complements a lot of the existing work that's being done on provenance and water marking and I think the ability for those individuals to be successful in their mission which is creating a safer online space this work can help guide these individuals to be more effective in their mission in that it highlights a technology that is not currently as discussed comparatively to these other Solutions and complements them in order to protect online communication you know social media is flooded with Bots and sometimes the problem with Bots is that they're posting fake content but other times the problem with Bots is that there are just so many of them and they're all retweeting each other and it's very hard to tell what's real and so what a personhood credential can do is say you know maybe each person is only allowed to have five accounts on a particular social media platform so Shay what's next on your research agenda are there lingering questions I know there are and key challenges here and if so how do you hope to answer them we believe we've aggregated a strong set of Industry academic and you know civil sector collaborators but we're only a small subset of the people who are going to be interacting with these systems and so the first area of next steps is to gather feedback about The Proposal of a solution that we've had and how can we improve that are there trade-offs that we're missing are there technical components that we weren't thinking as deeply through and I think there's a lot of narrow open questions that come out of this for instance how do personhood credentials relate to existing laws regarding identity theft or protection laws um in areas where service providers can't require government IDs how does that apply to personhood credentials that rely on government IDs I think that there's a lot of these open questions that we address in the paper that I think need more experimentation and thinking through but also a lot of empirical work to be done how do people react to personhood credentials and does it actually enhance confidence in our interactions online I think that there's a lot of open questions on the actual effectiveness of these tools and so I think there's a large area of work to be done there as well I've been thinking a lot about the early days of the internet I wasn't around for that but I know that every little decision that was made in a very short period of time had incredibly lasting consequences that we're still dealing with now there's an enormous path dependence in every kind of technology and I feel that right now we're in that period of time this small window where generative AI is this new thing to contend with and it's uprooting many of our assumptions about how our systems can work or should work and I'm trying to think about how to set up those institutions make these tiny decisions right so that in the future we have a digital architecture that's really serving the goals that we want it to serve very thoughtful with that shy Jane Zoe hitstick thank you so much for joining us today thank you so much Amber and thanks to our listen ERS as well if you'd like to learn more about shrey and Zoe's work on personhood credentials and advanced AI you'll find a link to this paper at aka.ms abstracts or you can read it on archive thanks again for tuning in I'm Amber tingle and we hope you'll join us next time on abstracts [Music]