![[poster-005-followers-are-humans.jpg]] i bet $10 bucks that a bunch of your followers are bots -- and this erodes the foundation of our ability for economic transactions indeed, how do you know your followers are humans? up until several months ago, it was easy to tell apart ai bots from real people. it is still mostly possible today as ai tends to answer in a way that, let's say, does not optimize for brevity. people do not exert as much effort in their comments as ai does. this is one of the main reasons we can still tell them apart. a lot of it can be solved by prompting. a lot of it will change as the models develop. soon, we will have no idea who comments under our posts, who engages with us, who greets us online for the first time. only people who we know from real life will carry any weight. especially since just a little later than text, we will have to stop trusting any form of audio & video content. and a little later still, live video too, including conference calls and live streaming. the time when you will need to prove your personhood when logging into many online services is closer and closer, and its necessity will be understood not just by the leaders of the space, but by every single individual. not because we will want to verify ourselves all the time, but because we will want others to be verified before they talk, before they enter any negotiation in business or in private, sign contracts, deliver services or products. all of our economy (and society) is built on trust. how do you maintain that trust in the world of shaky institutions, radicalizing ideologies, and the perfect storm of ai impersonation? #followers_humans #incontext_poster #artificial_intelligence --- // 13 oct 2025, berlin