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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

PGP tells you you're talking to an entity which could set up PGP, it doesn't help you determine if the account ben_w is merely one of many government sock puppet accounts trying to push a specific meme into the minds of the general population.

Knowing who to trust… was already hard-to-impossible with just normal social media; cheap LLMs will definitely make this harder, as more groups will be able to afford what was once limited to government budgets.

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The web of trust that was intended to be built by PGP is what would solve the "are you a real person" problem. We're connected to everyone else on earth by 3 or 4 degrees; it's unlikely that every path along that graph to another human is going to be adversarial such that a non-human can get added to the web of trust.

PGP's web of trust never worked because it was always too small to cover enough humans and take advantage of the low degree of overall connectivity.

So we need to go back to talking to people irl. And basically assume that anything you read online is not written by real people unless proven otherwise.

> So we need to go back to talking to people irl

This is a fundamental breakdown of society. It is literally societal collapse. It's not going to happen. We'd give up the telephone and even the telegraph.

> assume that anything you read online is not written by real people unless proven otherwise

You can't prove otherwise. It's literally impossible without watching a human write it and publish it, and even then you'd have to compare it to what you saw them type.

I was referring to PGP as a solution for being potentially MITM’d by an AI when trying to communicate with an entity you already trust.

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