most of the time you’ll be talking to a bot there without even realizing. they’re gonna feed you products and ads interwoven into conversations, and the AI can be controlled so its output reflects corporate interests. advertisers are gonna be able to buy access and run campaigns. based on their input, the AI can generate thousands of comments and posts, all to support your corporate agenda.
for example you can set it to hate a public figure and force negative commentary into conversations all over the site. you can set it to praise and recommend your latest product. like when a pharma company has a new pill out, they’ll be able to target self-help subs and flood them with fake anecdotes and user testimony that the new pill solves all your problems and you should check it out.
the only real humans you’ll find there are the shills that run the place, and the poor suckers that fall for the scam.
it’s gonna be a shithole.
the protecting your anonymity part would be very hard though, such a system has a high risk of eventually enabling a dystopian future where your every online move is being monitored by big brother
I was thinking that a mandatory donation to a charity could work. Like a simple $5 donation per account to any of a (carefully curated) list of charities. It would dramatically throttle new account creation / app adoption, of course, which is bad, but if a potential user wants it bad enough then they’d be OK with donating $5 to their favorite charity. It would reduce the number of bots / trolls / Sybils and it could work in a decentralized manner (imaging a lemmy instance doing this)
There will always be a trade-off between anonymity and authenticity. I could see a future where some web services will only interact with users that present a verified certificate that establishes them as a real person, even if it’s not necessarily tied to your real-world identity. Some could require a cert that is tied to your actual identity. Some others could allow general anonymous accounts, though they would struggle with spam and AI bots. But ultimately, I think people are going to come to value some amount of guarantee that they’re interacting with actual people.