Nye's Digital Lab is a weekly scribble on creativity and the future of making.
This week, I'm considering that we might need a human-only internet, and what that means for the verification business.
As I put my phone down in anger, having being again addicted to another scroll of horror, I’ve determined that I think this needs to... change.
What if the open internet we love becomes completely unusable for actual humans?
AI can now generate anything—essays, images, videos, voices, entire personalities.
And when everything can be faked, nothing can be trusted.
We’re entering an “Authenticity Arms Race.”
On one side, AI systems generating synthetic everything at scale. Every agentic swarm that goes live spreads lies, security risk, and malware skill sets. On the other side, a scramble to build verification systems that prove that thing, person, document, something... is real. But what does that defense look like?
As our legacy computing systems begin to fail, the landscape will change. The weapons in this arms race aren’t more cryptography; they’re credentialing systems, timestamps, and terrifying iris-scanning orbs.
The question, it seems, is whether the internet remains a place where humans can safely transact, create, and connect, or whether it devolves into a bot-infested wasteland where your grandma falls in love with a chatbot and drains her retirement account.
…To the Digital Lab!
AI broke the internet’s trust model.
For decades, we relied on simple heuristics. If someone had a verified email, a credit card, maybe a government ID, they were probably real. Yes, some get doxxed or identity-stolen, but it mostly worked. Then generative AI showed up.
Today, AI can pass the Turing test.
Remember when this was supposed to be the benchmark?!?
GPT-4 did it in 2024, meaning machines can now convincingly pretend to be human in conversation. Deepfakes are so good that you literally cannot trust video evidence anymore. Voice cloning requires about three seconds of audio. Profile pictures? Generated by Midjourney in twenty seconds. Even traditional verification methods are failing.
The scam economy is already exploding. Romance scams, investment fraud, phishing attacks, you name it. All supercharged by models that can maintain dozens of convincing personas simultaneously. There’s a reason between 2022 and 2023, Americans who reported feeling more concerned than excited about AI became a majority for the first time, rising from 38% to 52%.
People can feel the ground shifting beneath them.
The authenticity problem extends beyond scams into creativity and intellectual property.
When I ask students to create game prototypes or write design documents, how do I verify they actually made it? When they submit portfolios for jobs, how do companies know those aren’t AI-generated? When artists post work online, how do they prove they created it before someone else’s AI scraped and remixed it?
The old internet assumed trust by default and verified when necessary. The new internet might need to flip that model entirely: verify by default, trust when proven.
That’s a massive architectural shift, and it’s coming whether we’re ready or not.
Remember that time we hung out and I played guitar in the backyard?
No?
Neither do I, because it never happened.
So what’s being built to solve this? Turns out, a lot of futuristic stuff.
The identity verification market alone was valued around $6 billion in 2023 and is projected to hit $39 billion by 2025. Companies like Veriff, Onfido, Jumio, and IDnow are racing to build better identity proofing systems.
The approaches vary. This can be document verification, biometric checks, liveness detection, database cross-referencing—but they share a common goal: prove this person is who they claim to be, and prove they’re only claiming to be one person.
Then there’s the intellectual property angle. Cryptographic “zero knowledge” technology is being deployed to create tamper-proof records of creation and ownership. Timestamping allows creators to prove exactly when an idea, design, or manuscript was created, while digital rights management enables artists, musicians, and software developers to embed blockchain-based ownership into their works.
Startups like Story, which raised $80 million from Andreessen Horowitz, are building blockchain networks specifically to protect creators from AI theft. Their system embeds licensing fees and royalty-sharing arrangements directly into smart contracts, turning intellectual property into programmable assets.
But the wildest solution from the capitalist cypherpunks is what’s called “proof of personhood” or “proof of human.” The flagship project here is World (formerly Worldcoin), co-founded by Sam Altman of OpenAI. (Yes, the same guy building the AI that’s creating this problem is also building a system to solve it. The irony is not lost on anyone.)
World’s approach sounds like black mirror science fiction: you visit a device called an Orb (which looks exactly as futuristic as it sounds), it scans your iris, and you receive a World ID—a cryptographic proof that you’re a unique human being.
By December 2024, the network topped 20 million total participants, including over 9.5 million verified humans, and was adding as many as 800,000 new World App users per week. The system uses zero-knowledge proofs, meaning you can prove you’re human without revealing who you are.
It’s designed for privacy-preserving verification at scale.
In theory, proof of personhood solves problems that traditional identity verification can’t. It enables services that need to ensure one account per human: democratic voting systems, fair distribution of limited resources, bot-free social networks, and yes, even universal basic income if we ever get there.
If we believe the bear marketed crypto gang, wallets are evolving into identity management systems. You might soon carry verifiable credentials for your education, professional certifications, age verification, even your vaccination status. Likely, under your control rather than stored in some company’s database waiting to be breached.
It all sounds like we are on the verge of a solution?
All these solutions might work, technically. But do we want this iris-scan identity internet they’re building?
A human-verified internet sounds great until you think about the implications. Who controls the verification infrastructure? World might be decentralized in theory, but it’s still backed by massive VCs and built by for-profit companies.
The Orb system, if widely adopted, could consolidate immense control over digital identity in the hands of a single for-profit entity, especially if it becomes a gateway to accessing core internet services. That’s a lot of power to concentrate. And the fact that it looks like an alien mind control device should really be an indicator here.
Iris scans are permanent; you can’t change your eyes like you change a password.
If you encode records on cryptographic blockchains, they are immutable by design. What happens when a repressive government demands access to verification systems? What happens when your biometric data, despite all the zero-knowledge magic, gets compromised?
There’s also the fundamental question of whether we even want a two-tier internet: the verified zone where humans transact safely, and the wild-west zone where bots and AI agents roam free.
And here’s something I am starting to realize philosophically.
Systems evolve toward their stable states, not their ideal states.
The internet’s stable state in an age of generative AI probably does require widespread verification. Not because it’s utopian, but because the alternative—a bot-flooded network where nothing can be trusted—is worse!
We need to be part of this conversation now. The students sitting in classrooms today will be the ones designing these systems, building these platforms, and making these policy decisions. They need to understand not just the technology but the trade-offs.
Privacy versus security.
Convenience versus control.
Openness versus safety.
The authenticity arms race isn’t going away.
My hope? That we build verification systems that are as decentralized, privacy-preserving, and user-controlled as possible. That we resist the temptation to let a handful of companies own the infrastructure of trust.
That we treat authentication as critically important to our livelihood.
We’re building these systems to protect human authenticity in a world where AI can fake anything. But the greatest threat to authenticity might not be the AI at all—it might be the Orwellian surveillance infrastructure we build to fight it.
Stay weird, stay human, and maybe go get your iris scanned. Or don’t, and face the internet over-run by generative who-knows-what.
The choice, for now at least, is still yours.
Hey! That’s it for this time. I do this every week, if you vibe to the ideas I express, consider subscribing or sharing with friends. If you like tech-detoxing with a book like I do, I crammed some of last years best essays into a printed collection.
This essay was built from my personal knowledge base in Obsidian / Claude Code. Final sweetening was done with Claude Sonnet 4.5.
For more info visit: https://nyewarburton.com
We’ll see you next time.
Veriff, “AI-Powered Identity Verification,” March 2025, https://www.veriff.com/
Intellectual Market Insights, “Top Leading Identity Verification Market Companies in 2025,” April 2025
Proof, “Top 10 Identity Verification Solutions to Consider in 2026”
Enterprise League, “Top 21 Digital Identity Startups You Should Know in 2025,” December 2024
Tracxn, “Top Companies in Customer Identity Verification,” October 2025
Failory, “The Full List of 14 Identity Management Unicorn Startups,” December 2025
Lexology, “Top 5 Intellectual Property Trends in 2025,” September 2025
California Management Review, “Supporting Intellectual Property Protection: Blockchain Technology as a Catalyst for Open Innovation,” May 2025
IPWatchdog, “Beyond Blockchain: Diverse Approaches to Safeguarding Trade Secrets in the Digital Era,” May 2024
Blockchain Council, “Blockchain for Intellectual Property Protection,” August 2025
CNBC, “Blockchain Startup Story Raises Funds from a16z to Stop IP Theft by AI,” August 2024
World, “Proof of Personhood: What It Is and Why It’s Needed,” April 2023
Anthony Tan, “Worldcoin — The Proof of Your Humanity,” June 2025
World, “Proof of Human Is Essential, and It’s Going Mainstream in 2025,” December 2024
, “World: A Mission Critical Identity Solution,” June 2025
CSO Online, “What Is Worldcoin’s Proof-of-Personhood System?” September 2023
Ledger, “What Is Worldcoin?” June 2025
Vitalik Buterin, “What Do I Think About Biometric Proof of Personhood?” July 2023
When Automation meets "The God Complex," October 12, 2025
Networks of Trust, September 21, 2025
The Biff Problem, August 24, 2025
Nye's Digital Lab is a weekly scribble on creativity and the future of making.
This week, I'm considering that we might need a human-only internet, and what that means for the verification business.
As I put my phone down in anger, having being again addicted to another scroll of horror, I’ve determined that I think this needs to... change.
What if the open internet we love becomes completely unusable for actual humans?
AI can now generate anything—essays, images, videos, voices, entire personalities.
And when everything can be faked, nothing can be trusted.
We’re entering an “Authenticity Arms Race.”
On one side, AI systems generating synthetic everything at scale. Every agentic swarm that goes live spreads lies, security risk, and malware skill sets. On the other side, a scramble to build verification systems that prove that thing, person, document, something... is real. But what does that defense look like?
As our legacy computing systems begin to fail, the landscape will change. The weapons in this arms race aren’t more cryptography; they’re credentialing systems, timestamps, and terrifying iris-scanning orbs.
The question, it seems, is whether the internet remains a place where humans can safely transact, create, and connect, or whether it devolves into a bot-infested wasteland where your grandma falls in love with a chatbot and drains her retirement account.
…To the Digital Lab!
AI broke the internet’s trust model.
For decades, we relied on simple heuristics. If someone had a verified email, a credit card, maybe a government ID, they were probably real. Yes, some get doxxed or identity-stolen, but it mostly worked. Then generative AI showed up.
Today, AI can pass the Turing test.
Remember when this was supposed to be the benchmark?!?
GPT-4 did it in 2024, meaning machines can now convincingly pretend to be human in conversation. Deepfakes are so good that you literally cannot trust video evidence anymore. Voice cloning requires about three seconds of audio. Profile pictures? Generated by Midjourney in twenty seconds. Even traditional verification methods are failing.
The scam economy is already exploding. Romance scams, investment fraud, phishing attacks, you name it. All supercharged by models that can maintain dozens of convincing personas simultaneously. There’s a reason between 2022 and 2023, Americans who reported feeling more concerned than excited about AI became a majority for the first time, rising from 38% to 52%.
People can feel the ground shifting beneath them.
The authenticity problem extends beyond scams into creativity and intellectual property.
When I ask students to create game prototypes or write design documents, how do I verify they actually made it? When they submit portfolios for jobs, how do companies know those aren’t AI-generated? When artists post work online, how do they prove they created it before someone else’s AI scraped and remixed it?
The old internet assumed trust by default and verified when necessary. The new internet might need to flip that model entirely: verify by default, trust when proven.
That’s a massive architectural shift, and it’s coming whether we’re ready or not.
Remember that time we hung out and I played guitar in the backyard?
No?
Neither do I, because it never happened.
So what’s being built to solve this? Turns out, a lot of futuristic stuff.
The identity verification market alone was valued around $6 billion in 2023 and is projected to hit $39 billion by 2025. Companies like Veriff, Onfido, Jumio, and IDnow are racing to build better identity proofing systems.
The approaches vary. This can be document verification, biometric checks, liveness detection, database cross-referencing—but they share a common goal: prove this person is who they claim to be, and prove they’re only claiming to be one person.
Then there’s the intellectual property angle. Cryptographic “zero knowledge” technology is being deployed to create tamper-proof records of creation and ownership. Timestamping allows creators to prove exactly when an idea, design, or manuscript was created, while digital rights management enables artists, musicians, and software developers to embed blockchain-based ownership into their works.
Startups like Story, which raised $80 million from Andreessen Horowitz, are building blockchain networks specifically to protect creators from AI theft. Their system embeds licensing fees and royalty-sharing arrangements directly into smart contracts, turning intellectual property into programmable assets.
But the wildest solution from the capitalist cypherpunks is what’s called “proof of personhood” or “proof of human.” The flagship project here is World (formerly Worldcoin), co-founded by Sam Altman of OpenAI. (Yes, the same guy building the AI that’s creating this problem is also building a system to solve it. The irony is not lost on anyone.)
World’s approach sounds like black mirror science fiction: you visit a device called an Orb (which looks exactly as futuristic as it sounds), it scans your iris, and you receive a World ID—a cryptographic proof that you’re a unique human being.
By December 2024, the network topped 20 million total participants, including over 9.5 million verified humans, and was adding as many as 800,000 new World App users per week. The system uses zero-knowledge proofs, meaning you can prove you’re human without revealing who you are.
It’s designed for privacy-preserving verification at scale.
In theory, proof of personhood solves problems that traditional identity verification can’t. It enables services that need to ensure one account per human: democratic voting systems, fair distribution of limited resources, bot-free social networks, and yes, even universal basic income if we ever get there.
If we believe the bear marketed crypto gang, wallets are evolving into identity management systems. You might soon carry verifiable credentials for your education, professional certifications, age verification, even your vaccination status. Likely, under your control rather than stored in some company’s database waiting to be breached.
It all sounds like we are on the verge of a solution?
All these solutions might work, technically. But do we want this iris-scan identity internet they’re building?
A human-verified internet sounds great until you think about the implications. Who controls the verification infrastructure? World might be decentralized in theory, but it’s still backed by massive VCs and built by for-profit companies.
The Orb system, if widely adopted, could consolidate immense control over digital identity in the hands of a single for-profit entity, especially if it becomes a gateway to accessing core internet services. That’s a lot of power to concentrate. And the fact that it looks like an alien mind control device should really be an indicator here.
Iris scans are permanent; you can’t change your eyes like you change a password.
If you encode records on cryptographic blockchains, they are immutable by design. What happens when a repressive government demands access to verification systems? What happens when your biometric data, despite all the zero-knowledge magic, gets compromised?
There’s also the fundamental question of whether we even want a two-tier internet: the verified zone where humans transact safely, and the wild-west zone where bots and AI agents roam free.
And here’s something I am starting to realize philosophically.
Systems evolve toward their stable states, not their ideal states.
The internet’s stable state in an age of generative AI probably does require widespread verification. Not because it’s utopian, but because the alternative—a bot-flooded network where nothing can be trusted—is worse!
We need to be part of this conversation now. The students sitting in classrooms today will be the ones designing these systems, building these platforms, and making these policy decisions. They need to understand not just the technology but the trade-offs.
Privacy versus security.
Convenience versus control.
Openness versus safety.
The authenticity arms race isn’t going away.
My hope? That we build verification systems that are as decentralized, privacy-preserving, and user-controlled as possible. That we resist the temptation to let a handful of companies own the infrastructure of trust.
That we treat authentication as critically important to our livelihood.
We’re building these systems to protect human authenticity in a world where AI can fake anything. But the greatest threat to authenticity might not be the AI at all—it might be the Orwellian surveillance infrastructure we build to fight it.
Stay weird, stay human, and maybe go get your iris scanned. Or don’t, and face the internet over-run by generative who-knows-what.
The choice, for now at least, is still yours.
Hey! That’s it for this time. I do this every week, if you vibe to the ideas I express, consider subscribing or sharing with friends. If you like tech-detoxing with a book like I do, I crammed some of last years best essays into a printed collection.
This essay was built from my personal knowledge base in Obsidian / Claude Code. Final sweetening was done with Claude Sonnet 4.5.
For more info visit: https://nyewarburton.com
We’ll see you next time.
Veriff, “AI-Powered Identity Verification,” March 2025, https://www.veriff.com/
Intellectual Market Insights, “Top Leading Identity Verification Market Companies in 2025,” April 2025
Proof, “Top 10 Identity Verification Solutions to Consider in 2026”
Enterprise League, “Top 21 Digital Identity Startups You Should Know in 2025,” December 2024
Tracxn, “Top Companies in Customer Identity Verification,” October 2025
Failory, “The Full List of 14 Identity Management Unicorn Startups,” December 2025
Lexology, “Top 5 Intellectual Property Trends in 2025,” September 2025
California Management Review, “Supporting Intellectual Property Protection: Blockchain Technology as a Catalyst for Open Innovation,” May 2025
IPWatchdog, “Beyond Blockchain: Diverse Approaches to Safeguarding Trade Secrets in the Digital Era,” May 2024
Blockchain Council, “Blockchain for Intellectual Property Protection,” August 2025
CNBC, “Blockchain Startup Story Raises Funds from a16z to Stop IP Theft by AI,” August 2024
World, “Proof of Personhood: What It Is and Why It’s Needed,” April 2023
Anthony Tan, “Worldcoin — The Proof of Your Humanity,” June 2025
World, “Proof of Human Is Essential, and It’s Going Mainstream in 2025,” December 2024
, “World: A Mission Critical Identity Solution,” June 2025
CSO Online, “What Is Worldcoin’s Proof-of-Personhood System?” September 2023
Ledger, “What Is Worldcoin?” June 2025
Vitalik Buterin, “What Do I Think About Biometric Proof of Personhood?” July 2023
When Automation meets "The God Complex," October 12, 2025
Networks of Trust, September 21, 2025
The Biff Problem, August 24, 2025
How much longer before I can effectively make myself into anything I want?
BeInCrypto, “World Builds Proof of Human for the Internet’s Future of Trust,” September 2025
FinTech Weekly, “Your Identity Is Your Most Valuable Asset; It’s About To Become Income, Too,” January 2026
How much longer before I can effectively make myself into anything I want?
BeInCrypto, “World Builds Proof of Human for the Internet’s Future of Trust,” September 2025
FinTech Weekly, “Your Identity Is Your Most Valuable Asset; It’s About To Become Income, Too,” January 2026
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