Yes, this is a good realistic danger too. Is anyone seriously working on ways to authenticate human-generated content online that don't destroy all possibility of anonymity? CAPTCHAs will soon be impossible. Watermarking or otherwise detecting LLM content is not going to be possible long term. Centralized ID services are unpalatable. Maybe some kind of web of trust would be the way to go.
There are three properties I think we probably want.
1. I can prove to a site that I am a human without the site getting any information from the proof about which specific human I am.
2. I can visit the site multiple times and prove to them that I'm the same human, without them getting any information from the proofs about which specific human I am.
3. Any third party site that is involved in the proof does not get any information about which site I trying to prove my identity to.
One way this could be done is by having ID sites that you are willing to prove your real identity to in a robust and way which certify your humanity to other sites in a way that has the three aforementioned properties.
Good candidates for running ID sites would be entities like major banks that most of us have already verified our real identity to in a robust way.
One way to do this might be something like this. When a site wants to check that I'm human they give me some random data, and I have an ID site that I have an account with such as my major bank do a blind signature of that data, using a blind signature system the allows the blinder to remove the blinding.
When I get back the signed blinded data, I remove the blinding and then send the data and unblinded signature back to the site I'm trying to prove my humanity to.
They see that the data is signed by my major bank's ID service, so know that the bank believes I'm human.
