This is kind of a continuation from a Threads post that I had written the other day about how I think the next wave of internet use is going to be defined by a desire to validate the original source of information and have a mechanism to ensure that content is authentic. Stepping back a bit thought when widespread internet use first kicked off the world was a very different place. Everyone on the internet was pretty much guaranteed to be a real living, breathing human being and people were just trying to see what kind of things would stick. Pretty much everyone had goofy handles or pseudonyms and sharing details about who you actually were wasn’t something that was generally super popular.

Fast forward to now and we have quite a different story. Everyone is online and its use permeates our society: news, sports, culture, art, entertainment, work…. everything seems to be powered, facilitated, or mediated by use of the internet. The old-guard of the internet might still crave the pseudo-anonymity and think oversharing is weird but newer generations have come up for whom there is no pre-internet existence. Sharing snippits of life on social media and being authentic (or at least public) about identity is the only thing that many have experienced.

Throw into the mix the sudden explosion in quality and availability of generative AI’s and now anyone can say anything as anyone else. This isn’t intended to be fearmongering, just sharing reality. Tools like HeyGen will ultimately allow for anyone to create convincing deep faked content to facilitate in spam, disinformation, or other illegal or damaging activities. Smartphone manufacturers are adding increasingly complex GenAI capabilities to their operating systems, allowing us to capture moments or edit photos to create a representation of events that may never have occurred.

With all of these capabilities and our sociatal reliance on information shared via the internet it will become increasingly important to be able to rapidly identify real vs fake content. The burden of this lookup cannot be too expensive on the consumer either as if it is many will not bother to actually check wha they are consuming. Given that assumption then, I believe that we will see a continued change in user behavior. In order to protect our individual brands the average person will seek to prove their authenticity and the authenticity of their content. Iff this becomes the norm, then the default behavior when consuming content will be to treat anything not marked as authentic by the author as suspect.

The details on how we might do this (both at an individual level and for different types of content) isn’t meant to be in scope for this post but is something I’ve been thinking about and will write about in the future.

In honor of the theme of this post (and since this is my first time back in ~3 years) this’ll be the last post I pen with my handle as I transition to using my public identity.

-Sy14r (aka Geoff)