A Technology Solution for the Trust Crisis in Journalism and Digital Media
March 18, 2024
Digital journalism, specifically local news, is quietly undergoing a renaissance. While many observers harp on the problems of mainstream versus social media, there is a tremendous amount of innovation, and even increasing subscription revenue, in local journalism.
This trend will undoubtedly accelerate in 2024 with the $500M backing of Press Forward and their national initiative to "strengthen communities and democracy by supporting local news and information."
404 Media is representative of the transformation in local journalism. They describe themselves as a “journalist-founded digital media company exploring the ways technology is shaping–and is shaped by–our world.” Somewhat ironically, emerging technology, in the form of AI, is also an existential threat.
It turns out that AI tools are eating local journalism. 404 Media's founders, recently explained their predicament in a post, AI Spam Is Eating the Internet, Stealing Our Work, and Destroying Discoverability.
SpinRewriter lets users create 1,000 slightly different versions of the same article with a single click and to automatically publish them to as many WordPress sites as you want using a paid plugin.
The underlying technology is known as Emulated Natural Language (ENL). On their website, SpinRewriter boldly proclaims that their service "produces the kind of articles where there's absolutely NO way to tell they were created by an AI.". Furthermore, they claim to deliver "top-quality content that ranks on Google like a boss."
The problem, of course, is not limited to scrappy startups like 404 Media. Sam Harris, the philosopher, neuroscientist, podcast host and author, recently proclaimed in a podcast interview that “the internet will die because of AI.”
I think within the next 12 months- 2 years, . . . most of what's online that purports to be information could soon be fake. . . . All of the friction for misinformation has been taken out of the system. . . . We are not going to be able to figure out what's real.
But is there a positive side to this dire picture of an AI-driven information apocalypse? According to Andrew Golis:
There will be silver linings to The Great Robot Spam Flood of 2024.” Will the robots make us more human? This flood of authorless 'content' will help truly authored creativity shine in contrast.
Perhaps. But in the absence of an unhackable and ungameable system of identity and authenticity, how can we distinguish between the authentic and the synthetic?
What’s to be done? Can trust technology save authentic journalism and preserve the epistemic commons?
Few people know that the internet even has a 'trust infrastructure' -- but it does. Unfortunately it has proven to be inadequate, outdated, and poorly governed. This trust layer is known as Web public key infrastructure, or Web PKI for short. Beyond encrypting traffic to web sites, it delivers very little value to the average user of the internet. As such, it has done little to prevent the crisis of trust that afflicts the Internet as a whole, but especially social media platforms.
In its general use, Web PKI helps us know that we are sending our credit card information to a server controlled by the legal entity Amazon, Inc. It also encrypts that traffic so it cannot be read by a third party. Its limitation? It can't tell you whether you trust the specific content presented on a given web page. In other words, it's no help in distinguishing whether an article, a graphic, or a video was created by a human that you trust, or is simply an AI generated hallucination.
Another problem with Web PKI is centralization. Web PKI, through a system of certificate authorities and 'root certificates' provides you, the reader, citizen, person, with precisely zero control over who you trust. Using today's Web PKI for content authenticity would naturally lend itself to censorship, where the state or corporate interests decide what is trustworthy.
As far back as 2014, Moxie Marlinspike pointed out the need for an alternative to Web PKI in his seminal talk, SSL and the Future of Authenticity.
"We can boil down all of the problems we've had with certificate authorities to a single missing property: what I call trust agility."
According to Marlinspike, trust agility has two basic properties:
- A trust decision can be easily revised at any time.
- Individual users can decide where to anchor their trust.
In place of rigid, fairly static, certificate authorities and root certificates, we need trust anchors that are more flexibile and human-centered. Rather than placing trust in obscure companies, people should be able place their trust in organizations and networks that are familiar. Such trust agility would enable companies and creators to express their trustworthiness in network protocols themselves. Applications then become capable of expressing trustworthy content to people, without intermediation by shadowy central parties. It's a world without censorship or dark pattern algorithms.
Such trust agility trust depends on identity and authenticity. As an industry we’ve invested huge amounts of time and effort into authentication and access control for humans. What we have completely ignored is authentication for the “content” produced by those humans. We've secured the software supply chain, and the physical supply chain, giving no thought to securing the digital media supply chain.
Noosphere Technologies' goal is to level the playing field between humans and the robots. To achieve this goal, we are unbundling and democratizing PKI to make its power available to everyone who needs a recourse to authentic information.
To do that, we are tackling the critical problem of user experience. Every person who uses the internet must be able to benefit from trust signals in a natural and intuitive way.
We're also tackling the problem of app integration. The system is no good to anyone if developers can't easily add capabilities to whatever app they're building. Here we're drawing on our backgrounds in API management and developer experience to provide APIs, SDKs, and CLIs, that make trust signals available to people using a huge variety of apps, from newsreaders, to instant messaging, to gaming and beyond.
We’re building API-first services that make trust relationships transparent and manageable for non-technical people. To accomplish this, we’re building trust infrastructure, trust protocols, and trust services that enable trust agility -- putting the power to curate trust relationship in the hands of everyone on the internet.
In the process, we hope to secure our human-to-human future and restore some of the decentralized spontaneity and anarchy of the 1990's pre-social media platform internet.