[This is an enhanced transcript of a video I recently put up]. How can you know I’m me? That I made this?

Now, some random schmo can come along and ask “A.I.” to spin up a very convincing facsimile of me or of anything, really.

Wow: we’re about to drown in a tsunami of tripe, a deluge of deceit.

So how can you know this was made by me, or that anything else isn’t some deep fake? And should you even care?

Now, I love living in the future. I recently put out a video where I used machine learning to snoop keypresses just from sound

and to also make a boxing game

all on a chip that costs a few bux–and that’s just what I could do here, and it’s cool.

The flip side of all that power is that we’re already half way into a chasm of darkness and confusion where nothing is authentic and we no longer have a shred of shared reality

and my fear is that we’ll come out of it with a few isolated islands of certified TrueTruth(tm) by your technology giant of choice.

Yuk, no thanks.

What I have confidence in are distributed systems rather than megacorps or goverments (what’s the difference!?), what I want is human progress, and what I trust is individual people.

If you don’t actually care whether there’s anything real behind what you’re watching, I bring good tidings:
you’ve got enough drivel to swipe over for a googleplex lifetimes, coming right at ya.

But if you’re one of the morlocks hoping to preserve a morsel of agency, an iota of human connection and a handful of working neurons on the other side of all this, we’re going to need a way to tell what’s what.

The good news is, for those who do care, we already have everything required to preserve a little chunk of Human Web.

I’m going to show you how you can at least tell that some video was actually made by the real me and I’d love to see others let you do the same, or show me a better way.

The short answer is cryptography.

Here are my reasons to care and the easy recipe to follow.

Did you know that we owe all the ultra-processed “foods” to R&D by Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds diversifying into the food industry?

Before Blackrock and Vanguard came in, what made General Mills, Kraft and all of them into the garbage farms they are now is tobacco companies. mmmm. Look it up, it explains a lot.

Now, are these corporations evil or is this just the result of emergent patterns when market forces meet human weaknesses?

Who cares!?

It hardly matters, when we’re at a point where 70% of a child’s diet in the US is comprised of this junk… obesity and lowered life expectancy are the result and the point is that none all that was … for YOU.

You just get to live in the world it’s created and bare the consequences.

Now think about generative AI: the Ultra-processed food for thought that are Claude, Seedance, ChatGPT and whatever comes next.

I’ve got no hard data there yet, but when you consider that the slow expansion of cable television across Norway turned into a natural experiment that showed it had a negative impact on IQ…

That was Cable TV.

Pretty easy to hypothesise that this new “Thinking as a Service” (TaaS), and the landslide of fakes isn’t going to be great for the world.

Now, you’re a grownup and can use “AI” however you like and I’m not going to turn this into some anti-AI rant: I’ve used LLMs and one day hope we’ll have great search engines and agents under our own control that sift through data and handle dumb things for us.

The point is just to remember that this is powerful stuff–C4 to your independence: handle with care–and that all that money and effort is not being expended for YOU.

And then there’s the army of bad actors who are going to leverage all this to steal real effort, make a buck and sew chaos. Also not working for us.

In the midst of all that, you might want to preserve a bit of sanity and capacity by giving your time and attention to actual people you trust rather than content farms dolling out slop.

Because what I make, and I’m not alone, what I share and put online, is for you.

Make no mistake, it’s for me, too, if only because a rising tide lifts all ships.

See, coming up, I never had a mentor, or someone I could turn to to learn electronics and get over the humps: I know what that feels like and, if something I find and share helps anyone progress faster,
then they can spend time on new, unsolved, mysteries, and maybe even be inspired to share the results with us… Everybody wins.

I’m pretty lucky, but I’ve found the people I work with, those I meet at conferences or interact with online, the creators I follow: all of you guys are similarly curious, generous, playful… human.

And I don’t want to lose that in the coming flood.

I’d rather stay connected to humanity than live in the brave new nightmare where my girlfriend is a make-believe data harvester, where I’ve lost the ability to function without an internet connection, where my favorite song was algorithmically generated to my particular tastes and never heard once by another living soul.

Can you imagine how meaningless that world becomes, the crushing loneliness?

I’ll pass: just not interested.

So I’ll be travelling and going to as many conferences as I can, so we can have time together in meat-space, but in between those, I want to give anyone interested a way to be sure that I made this and maybe normalize a way for us all to tell when content is non-GMO and really from where we think it’s coming from.

Here’s how.

Everyone knows the little lock/”connection is secure” thing in web browsers.
Thanks to that, you can be sure that you’re actually on youtube.com and that your connection can’t be evesdropped on.

The good news is that how this works is out of your hands and everything is handled for you: the mechanisms behind it come bundled with your OS and browser and you can pretty much count on it working.

The bad news is that how this works is out of your hands and you have to trust some centralized authority to decide who is trustable and who isn’t.

With PGP–pretty good privacy–the good news is that you have control over who it is that you trust.

But, of course, the bad news is that you have control over who it is you trust, so there’s a bit of extra effort involved.

But getting started is easy.

From now on, you’ll find a little blob at the end of the description of my videos that looks like this.

That’s just the first sentence of the video and its link, signed using PGP.

PGP let’s you create pairs of keys to allow private communications but also gives you a way to uniquely sign data to say, “yeah, this is really coming from me“.

Here the crypto isn’t used for privacy, anyone can read the message because what we care about is authentication: thanks to that blob, you can always know that only my private key could have signed that particular message, and verifying that is as easy as:

1) Checking that the sentence in there is what I actually said at the top of the video,
and the link is what you are looking at

2) using that signature to verify that I actually signed it

If you already know PGP, get my public key and then verify the signature block the usual way.

But there’s an easy way now, using the Sig Scout Chrome Extension. With that extension, in Chrome, Brave or other derivative browsers, you can just click a button to verify any web page or video that contains a signature.

For this to work, you need
1) to install the browser extension (I hope to get in the webstore, but it’s pending review so you can do it yourself with the instructions linked)
2) to click “Trusted Keys” -> “Add Trusted Key” and paste in the link provided by your favorite creator, like https://inductive-kickback.com/downloads/psychogenic-pubkey.json

And from there it’s a single click to verify the signature on any page.

None of this proves you aren’t being fed lazy BS, only that it was really authenticated by someone you’ve trusted.

You get to decide who that is. I have detailed instructions you can follow.

From then on, if you ever have a doubt, you can verify the signature and know that my key signed it, and I probably did make this.

And that’s pretty much it–I’d love it if all the creators I love would protect themselves from forgery and let me verify it’s them, this way.

I’m not saying it’s a foolproof solution and it does require a bit of effort and judgement. Grandma or anyone who thinks the internet is in their phone… yeah, they might well be cooked. But you have a choice.

See the full instructions if you want to play along and if you’d like to see your favorite creators do the same for you, let them know or point them here or to the video.

If you’ve made it this far, there’s something I want to add about AI in general.

I’m not saying that “AI” is a bad thing and shouldn’t be used.

It is definitely powerful, and going to become more so, and I’m quite certain I could get supercharged by leveraging it to its full extent.

However, for the same reason I’ve avoided even trying the magic of Adderall, I’m using caution around it because even if it works, I’m not a fan of dependence and there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch… it risks costing a lot more than money.

More importantly in this context, there is value to human growth, to working things out yourself, to expanding your capacity, to striving towards personal excellence, and there is great value to encouraging creation, cherishing connection and cultivating community. We’ve had it all by default, so far, just because it was fostered out of necessity.

Well, the necessity isn’t going away, even if we’re being sold another story, and it’s going to take some of us to carry things along for a little while, to remember how to do things, to preserve a semblance of understanding of reality and to keep communities alive.

This is a graph of the questions and answers on stack overflow since 2015.

Sure looks like it’s dying.

Now is where we decide if the human endeavour–creativity, exploration, competence, invention… you know, the stuff all the AI was trained on–keeps being encouraged or just dwindles..

But here’s my warning to anyone who agrees with me: there will be a cost to being a holding out a bit and insisting on doing your own thinking, or even just supporting other actual people, doing actual things.

The truth is it can get heavy: you get called names and sometimes eat a bunch of shit.
You don’t even get a prize when you’re finally vindicated five years later.
Ask me how I know (in person, ideally over a few beer)… Whatever, it’s the right thing to do.

But there’s a cost, it’s going to take a bit of effort.

I am a free and fully functional human. My promises to you are that I’ll do my best to stay that way,
and that, if you see that signature or my content, I, this real person, made it on my own. For you.

The original video: