10 ms·

I run a niche creative community, and we outlawed AI-generated content in 2022 as it was easy to see how corrosive it would be to the community. It hasn't been

I run a niche creative community, and we outlawed AI-generated content in 2022 as it was easy to see how corrosive it would be to the community. It hasn't been easy. We ban fake AI accounts daily and shrug off around 600 AI content creator accounts monthly. It's a lot of work, extra work that wasn't needed before AI content came around, and of course, that is an extra cost. I fear losing the battle.

WolfeReader 6mo ago
Unlike a lot of communities, yours at least started on the correct side. Better to ban outright, than to slowly realize that you should have banned it.
- RodgerTheGreat 6mo ago
  Indeed. Take a soft approach, or "wait and see", and you'll just allow your community to get infested with slop enthusiast crybullies that loudly protest any pushback against "genai content". The communities that draw a firm line and hold it will be the only ones that endure.
  - CrzyLngPwd 6mo ago
    It was a surprise to us how vehemently some folk defended AI content and assumed it was their right to post it within our community. We had no problems with people using it and posting elsewhere, it was the demands that we must allow it that were problematic and made us question whether we were doing the right thing. No regrets now, though, as we see competitors being flooded with AI slop and they are too invested in it to change now. Now I see it as the perfect tool for impostors.
    - protocolture 6mo ago
      >It was a surprise to us how vehemently some folk defended AI content and assumed it was their right to post it within our community. People often confuse freedom of speech, with freedom to access a specific platform for speech. Its dead wrong, I dont know why people would want to be in a community where they arent wanted.
      - lordfrito 6mo ago
        > I dont know why people would want to be in a community where they arent wanted. This is standard predatory behavior. Child abusers hanging out with kids, weirdos hanging out near the women's clothing department, etc. It's usually a clear indication of the sort of people you don't want to associate with in your online community. They bring a net negative to the table.
        card_zero 6mo ago
        What is "it"? Putting the two halves together, the sort of people who want to be in a community where they aren't wanted are the sort of people you don't want in that community. I guess I can't argue with that.
        81AB24FB 6mo ago
        They are talking about social norms. Inversely, "creepers". Most adults understand why men should not, generally, be hanging out in the women's clothing department. When accidental violations of those norms are pointed out, they apologize and correct. Creepers, OTOH, gonna creep. For their own well-being, online communities should police repeated violation of social norms. Otherwise the normals leave and creepers take over.
        card_zero 6mo ago
        I spose. But labelling deviants (from the norm) and chasing them away is hazardous, because if you overdo it you end up with an echo chamber. How dare you talk to the people who others don't talk to, you traitor! Now you have to be ostracized too ... is how it might go. (I can't help thinking of the Father Ted Christmas special, where a group of priests have to organize a quasi-military operation in order to escape from Ireland's largest lingerie department without a scandal.)
    - Seattle3503 6mo ago
      I have a similar problem in a community I'm a a part of? How are you reliably detecting AI?
      - 81AB24FB 6mo ago
        It's not about perfectly identifying AI content. There's a relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/ When posts fall within "acceptable" then it does not actually matter where it comes from. Logorrhea, massively offtopic, and/or shitposting are bad when humans do it. Those should suffer the same fate. Historically it was tolerable, but has become the highest priority today because machines have cranked up the volume. If we mis-identify human garbage as robot nonsense it does not matter.
- prophesi 6mo ago
  When it comes to slow forum content, I think it's a fool's errand to try to determine if someone is using AI for their responses. Any of the tell-tale signs of AI are easily skirted by mentioning in their prompt to not do so. It goes back to how you can't sanitize human language which has been an issue with LLM's from the beginning. Encouraging a culture of not using AI works to an extent, but I also tire of threads claiming the parent post is AI. There isn't a sure-fire way to know one way or another.
  - strogonoff 6mo ago
    Barriers is what makes a community; by definition, if there was truly zero barriers, there would be one ambient global pot. When barriers are eliminated, communities either erect new barriers or die. The barrier of rejecting LLM content is a basic pre-requisite of any community of humans directly engaging with other humans in good faith. There are always ways to achieve that: long vetting process and in-person meetings, high membership price, trusted computing verification, etc. It’s an arms race, but you only have to make it not worth it to the attacker. Therefore, communities will either die, become much less accessible, or delegate human verification arms race to a service—most likely paid solutions provided by the very industry that is providing the products killing those communities[0]. [0] For example, see Altman’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_(blockchain) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_(blockchain).
thinkingtoilet 6mo ago
What about charging $1 or $5 for an account? Seems like you could stem the tide pretty easily with something like that.
- ishouldstayaway 6mo ago
  We bringing back Something Awful, now?
  - wffurr 6mo ago
    It never left.
  - HerbManic 6mo ago
    No it's Something IS awful. Sorry, they did an interview about 20 years back were they kept correcting the host to 'Something is awful' I have just called it that ever since.
  - quickthrowman 6mo ago
    Jeffery of YOSPOS bought it before Lowtax overdosed on mangosteen and it’s still operating.
  - RankingMember 6mo ago
    The :10bux: requirement did seem to do a good job of weeding out the lowest-level trash/spammers and encouraged people to toe the (sometimes very blurry) line. I remember how absolutely godawful some of the no-signup-fee SA-offshoots were (remember TheGunOwner's spin-off site "LivingWithStyle"?), to say nothing about 4chan.
- pojntfx 6mo ago
  If you head to Twitter right now, the vast majority of bots are blue checks. It seems to actually encourage the opposite, where you trusting that someone paying $8 for an account makes you even more likely to fall for slop
  - 6mo ago
protocolture 6mo ago
>shrug off around 600 AI content creator accounts monthly. >I fear losing the battle. I was in a small niche creative writing community for a while. Circa 2021\22. AI wasn't why I was there but I demo'd a few LLMs to a lot of the users in the Off Topic section because people were curious. Even with an explanation of how they operated, almost everyone was at least interested. One author told me how he operated similarly, rote learning how to write like his favorite authors by copying out their texts, hand written, word for word. Their concern was largely that they were too hard to use from a technical perspective. These people knew I was there to learn, and that I was unlikely to ever try and publish LLM derived content. I said as much often. Sometime in late 2022, a switch was flipped. And almost all of them started talking about how AI and those who used it were unambiguously evil. They didn't say my name, but they stopped engaging with me. Gradually, they started reposting twitter content from extremely anti AI people. Complained about AI submissions to various publications. Eventually, someone reposted a tweet calling for the death of anyone who used an LLM, with not even a single disagreement (and lots of encouragement) I just bailed. I had only ever engaged positively, answered questions for the curious and tried to help people out. I posted one AI assisted story, and that was to demonstrate how my contributions were tracked vs AI contributions automatically in the editor to satisfy someones curiosity. Clearly highlighting the bits I had written. Just a technical demo. No one was asked to enjoy or positively engage with it as if it was human written. A while later, most of their submission rules were updated with a new clause, if it was judged that AI written content was discovered, they would blacklist that person from all submissions across their entire community. Considering I had demo'd LLMs, and the uselessness of AI detectors, it was clear to me that these people would be able to justify blacklisting me if I poked my head up at all. I had been developing my own story for submission (myself, no LLM content), but I just dropped it. I just didn't feel like sticking my neck out for the witch hunt. I also used to be quite engaged with blockchain. And it went through a similar process, most people ignored it until that paper about the power usage (Claiming it would spike to some level it never reached) and then suddenly being associated with it was an outrageous moral crime. But after a while, when it turned out that the power use claims were largely a nothing burger, people gave up on the hate parade. I don't think you will "Lose the battle" (at least in terms of keeping AI users out). And its always ok for small communities to be selective about their membership. I just don't think its possible to maintain such artificial rage for more than a few years. The AI Datacenter water/power claims are a clear London Horse Manure problem that looks set to resolve itself, and the copyright issues will get sorted to some degree. Eventually I think you just wont care enough to ban anyone except low effort spammers (of which there are a huge amount, granted). YMMV
throwaway2037 6mo ago
High quality anecdata are exactly the reason why I love HN. Thanks for posting about it. > fake AI accounts First, how do you identify them? Is it strictly admins monitoring posts/server-side logs or do users report odd behaviour? Second, what is the purpose of these accounts? Are they basically running submarine adverts, or are they just trolling (to harm the community)?
- rramadass 6mo ago
  A starting point for study; AI Deception: A Survey of Examples, Risks, and Potential Solutions - https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.14752 https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.14752 Deception Analysis with Artificial Intelligence: An Interdisciplinary Perspective - https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.05724 https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.05724
  - rramadass 6mo ago
    Some background (pre-AI) ; Online Deception in Social Media - https://cacm.acm.org/research/online-deception-in-social-media/ https://cacm.acm.org/research/online-deception-in-social-med...
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
- 21asdffdsa12 6mo ago
  Eagerness.. you let them work through a endless labyrinth of forms. While the human drops out after the 2nd form- the ai is willing to go all the way always.
  - spoiler 6mo ago
    Don't you lose really users by making it easy for bots to complete a sign up, but hard for humans?
    - Cyan488 6mo ago
      Maybe 5 required fields and 30 optional fields. Apart from "census dweebs" [1] I don't know of many people that fill in more than the required. [1]: https://thebeaverton.com/2026/05/local-nerd-disappointed-he-didnt-get-the-long-form-census/ https://thebeaverton.com/2026/05/local-nerd-disappointed-he-...
magic_hamster 6mo ago
The battle is lost. You never had a chance. There's nothing you can do against the constant torrent of AI content that's only getting started. The online communities that we know and love are going to change and there's nothing we can do about it. You can't keep AI out of any platform no matter what the community guidelines say or even if it seems locked down with no bot access. The only solution is in person meetups, bringing back the 3rd places, joining a club. Maybe it's not such a bad outcome.
mastermage 6mo ago
It realy is time for a Butlerian Jihad
- 21asdffdsa12 6mo ago
  The trick is to work on site and pour the counter-measures right into the foundation :P
- Quarrel 6mo ago
  Way back whenever I first read Dune, this seemed like such weird niche ban. I don't think I had a lot of respect for it. Now, like all good SciFi, it seems fairly prescient ....
nottorp 6mo ago
Hmm i'm curious how niche. Or ... how small can a community be and still be drowned in AI slop? Is it a community inside one of the major platforms, or it has its custom thing?
figassis 6mo ago
I may have a solution for you and could use some beta testers. Please reach out to me if you don't mind. Info on my profile.
- figassis 6mo ago
  It seems this is getting downvoted, no promotion. Understood, thanks for the reminder.
ricardobayes 6mo ago
I always find the most difficult is to deal with users who are not actively breaking any rules but are toxic and hurting the conversation. Given your experience, what's your take on handling this?
- BoredPositron 6mo ago
  In my experience it's okay to have some troll or odd users. If they do targeted campaigns against single users or small groups we ban them.
- armchairhacker 6mo ago
  Ban them. I also recommend making it explicit: your last rule should be “moderators have final discretion”. The hard part is figuring out when to apply rules leniently or strictly. For example, I think users should always be warned, then given shorter bans, before a long or perma ban (unless they break an obvious egregious rule, or they’re a suspected alt of a banned user). At the same time, you do need to kick out persistent rules lawyerers or they’ll drive away good users. Moderators shape their community. Hacker News is decent (compared to what it could be) because of dang and tomhow. Many communities (especially on Reddit) have become echo chambers, mainly because the mods are too happy to ban people for unspoken and/or vague rules.
  - joe_mamba 6mo ago
    >Ban them. I also recommend making it explicit: your last rule should be “moderators have final discretion”.[...] >[...] Many communities (especially on Reddit) have become echo chambers mainly because the mods are too happy to ban people for unspoken and/or vague rules To me, it seems you're contradicting yourself here. In the first paragraph you suggest the solution to vague rules (mods having full authority), but then in the second paragraph you admit how that turns the platform into an echo chamber.
    - armchairhacker 6mo ago
      The point is to have discretion but use it rarely. Reddit echo chambers use it way too often. It’s not contradictory but unfortunately impossible to fully explain, otherwise it would be explicit rules. When someone acts borderline, you must intuit when they’re acting in good or bad faith. Hence I think a first warning, then short ban, is necessary for anyone not obviously breaking a rule; because the former will be careful, but the latter will keep acting borderline again and again, avoiding exactly what you warned about while still causing malice.
TitaRusell 6mo ago
There will soon be a point when you cannot even tell if the post comes from a human or AI model.
- kijin 6mo ago
  Don't worry, every country seems to be moving toward a future in which you need to present government ID to use any online service whatsoever. This will solve the problem of automated signups ... until AI models start getting valid government IDs, too. /s

WolfeReader 6mo ago

Unlike a lot of communities, yours at least started on the correct side. Better to ban outright, than to slowly realize that you should have banned it.

RodgerTheGreat 6mo ago
Indeed. Take a soft approach, or "wait and see", and you'll just allow your community to get infested with slop enthusiast crybullies that loudly protest any pushback against "genai content". The communities that draw a firm line and hold it will be the only ones that endure.
- CrzyLngPwd 6mo ago
  It was a surprise to us how vehemently some folk defended AI content and assumed it was their right to post it within our community. We had no problems with people using it and posting elsewhere, it was the demands that we must allow it that were problematic and made us question whether we were doing the right thing. No regrets now, though, as we see competitors being flooded with AI slop and they are too invested in it to change now. Now I see it as the perfect tool for impostors.
  - protocolture 6mo ago
    >It was a surprise to us how vehemently some folk defended AI content and assumed it was their right to post it within our community. People often confuse freedom of speech, with freedom to access a specific platform for speech. Its dead wrong, I dont know why people would want to be in a community where they arent wanted.
    - lordfrito 6mo ago
      > I dont know why people would want to be in a community where they arent wanted. This is standard predatory behavior. Child abusers hanging out with kids, weirdos hanging out near the women's clothing department, etc. It's usually a clear indication of the sort of people you don't want to associate with in your online community. They bring a net negative to the table.
      - card_zero 6mo ago
        What is "it"? Putting the two halves together, the sort of people who want to be in a community where they aren't wanted are the sort of people you don't want in that community. I guess I can't argue with that.
        81AB24FB 6mo ago
        They are talking about social norms. Inversely, "creepers". Most adults understand why men should not, generally, be hanging out in the women's clothing department. When accidental violations of those norms are pointed out, they apologize and correct. Creepers, OTOH, gonna creep. For their own well-being, online communities should police repeated violation of social norms. Otherwise the normals leave and creepers take over.
        card_zero 6mo ago
        I spose. But labelling deviants (from the norm) and chasing them away is hazardous, because if you overdo it you end up with an echo chamber. How dare you talk to the people who others don't talk to, you traitor! Now you have to be ostracized too ... is how it might go. (I can't help thinking of the Father Ted Christmas special, where a group of priests have to organize a quasi-military operation in order to escape from Ireland's largest lingerie department without a scandal.)
  - Seattle3503 6mo ago
    I have a similar problem in a community I'm a a part of? How are you reliably detecting AI?
    - 81AB24FB 6mo ago
      It's not about perfectly identifying AI content. There's a relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/ When posts fall within "acceptable" then it does not actually matter where it comes from. Logorrhea, massively offtopic, and/or shitposting are bad when humans do it. Those should suffer the same fate. Historically it was tolerable, but has become the highest priority today because machines have cranked up the volume. If we mis-identify human garbage as robot nonsense it does not matter.
prophesi 6mo ago
When it comes to slow forum content, I think it's a fool's errand to try to determine if someone is using AI for their responses. Any of the tell-tale signs of AI are easily skirted by mentioning in their prompt to not do so. It goes back to how you can't sanitize human language which has been an issue with LLM's from the beginning. Encouraging a culture of not using AI works to an extent, but I also tire of threads claiming the parent post is AI. There isn't a sure-fire way to know one way or another.
- strogonoff 6mo ago
  Barriers is what makes a community; by definition, if there was truly zero barriers, there would be one ambient global pot. When barriers are eliminated, communities either erect new barriers or die. The barrier of rejecting LLM content is a basic pre-requisite of any community of humans directly engaging with other humans in good faith. There are always ways to achieve that: long vetting process and in-person meetings, high membership price, trusted computing verification, etc. It’s an arms race, but you only have to make it not worth it to the attacker. Therefore, communities will either die, become much less accessible, or delegate human verification arms race to a service—most likely paid solutions provided by the very industry that is providing the products killing those communities[0]. [0] For example, see Altman’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_(blockchain) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_(blockchain).

thinkingtoilet 6mo ago

What about charging $1 or $5 for an account? Seems like you could stem the tide pretty easily with something like that.

ishouldstayaway 6mo ago
We bringing back Something Awful, now?
- wffurr 6mo ago
  It never left.
- HerbManic 6mo ago
  No it's Something IS awful. Sorry, they did an interview about 20 years back were they kept correcting the host to 'Something is awful' I have just called it that ever since.
- quickthrowman 6mo ago
  Jeffery of YOSPOS bought it before Lowtax overdosed on mangosteen and it’s still operating.
- RankingMember 6mo ago
  The :10bux: requirement did seem to do a good job of weeding out the lowest-level trash/spammers and encouraged people to toe the (sometimes very blurry) line. I remember how absolutely godawful some of the no-signup-fee SA-offshoots were (remember TheGunOwner's spin-off site "LivingWithStyle"?), to say nothing about 4chan.
pojntfx 6mo ago
If you head to Twitter right now, the vast majority of bots are blue checks. It seems to actually encourage the opposite, where you trusting that someone paying $8 for an account makes you even more likely to fall for slop
- 6mo ago

protocolture 6mo ago

>shrug off around 600 AI content creator accounts monthly. >I fear losing the battle. I was in a small niche creative writing community for a while. Circa 2021\22. AI wasn't why I was there but I demo'd a few LLMs to a lot of the users in the Off Topic section because people were curious. Even with an explanation of how they operated, almost everyone was at least interested. One author told me how he operated similarly, rote learning how to write like his favorite authors by copying out their texts, hand written, word for word. Their concern was largely that they were too hard to use from a technical perspective. These people knew I was there to learn, and that I was unlikely to ever try and publish LLM derived content. I said as much often. Sometime in late 2022, a switch was flipped. And almost all of them started talking about how AI and those who used it were unambiguously evil. They didn't say my name, but they stopped engaging with me. Gradually, they started reposting twitter content from extremely anti AI people. Complained about AI submissions to various publications. Eventually, someone reposted a tweet calling for the death of anyone who used an LLM, with not even a single disagreement (and lots of encouragement) I just bailed. I had only ever engaged positively, answered questions for the curious and tried to help people out. I posted one AI assisted story, and that was to demonstrate how my contributions were tracked vs AI contributions automatically in the editor to satisfy someones curiosity. Clearly highlighting the bits I had written. Just a technical demo. No one was asked to enjoy or positively engage with it as if it was human written. A while later, most of their submission rules were updated with a new clause, if it was judged that AI written content was discovered, they would blacklist that person from all submissions across their entire community. Considering I had demo'd LLMs, and the uselessness of AI detectors, it was clear to me that these people would be able to justify blacklisting me if I poked my head up at all. I had been developing my own story for submission (myself, no LLM content), but I just dropped it. I just didn't feel like sticking my neck out for the witch hunt. I also used to be quite engaged with blockchain. And it went through a similar process, most people ignored it until that paper about the power usage (Claiming it would spike to some level it never reached) and then suddenly being associated with it was an outrageous moral crime. But after a while, when it turned out that the power use claims were largely a nothing burger, people gave up on the hate parade. I don't think you will "Lose the battle" (at least in terms of keeping AI users out). And its always ok for small communities to be selective about their membership. I just don't think its possible to maintain such artificial rage for more than a few years. The AI Datacenter water/power claims are a clear London Horse Manure problem that looks set to resolve itself, and the copyright issues will get sorted to some degree. Eventually I think you just wont care enough to ban anyone except low effort spammers (of which there are a huge amount, granted). YMMV

throwaway2037 6mo ago

High quality anecdata are exactly the reason why I love HN. Thanks for posting about it. > fake AI accounts First, how do you identify them? Is it strictly admins monitoring posts/server-side logs or do users report odd behaviour? Second, what is the purpose of these accounts? Are they basically running submarine adverts, or are they just trolling (to harm the community)?

rramadass 6mo ago
A starting point for study; AI Deception: A Survey of Examples, Risks, and Potential Solutions - https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.14752 https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.14752 Deception Analysis with Artificial Intelligence: An Interdisciplinary Perspective - https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.05724 https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.05724
- rramadass 6mo ago
  Some background (pre-AI) ; Online Deception in Social Media - https://cacm.acm.org/research/online-deception-in-social-media/ https://cacm.acm.org/research/online-deception-in-social-med...
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
21asdffdsa12 6mo ago
Eagerness.. you let them work through a endless labyrinth of forms. While the human drops out after the 2nd form- the ai is willing to go all the way always.
- spoiler 6mo ago
  Don't you lose really users by making it easy for bots to complete a sign up, but hard for humans?
  - Cyan488 6mo ago
    Maybe 5 required fields and 30 optional fields. Apart from "census dweebs" [1] I don't know of many people that fill in more than the required. [1]: https://thebeaverton.com/2026/05/local-nerd-disappointed-he-didnt-get-the-long-form-census/ https://thebeaverton.com/2026/05/local-nerd-disappointed-he-...

magic_hamster 6mo ago

The battle is lost. You never had a chance. There's nothing you can do against the constant torrent of AI content that's only getting started. The online communities that we know and love are going to change and there's nothing we can do about it. You can't keep AI out of any platform no matter what the community guidelines say or even if it seems locked down with no bot access. The only solution is in person meetups, bringing back the 3rd places, joining a club. Maybe it's not such a bad outcome.

mastermage 6mo ago

It realy is time for a Butlerian Jihad

21asdffdsa12 6mo ago
The trick is to work on site and pour the counter-measures right into the foundation :P
Quarrel 6mo ago
Way back whenever I first read Dune, this seemed like such weird niche ban. I don't think I had a lot of respect for it. Now, like all good SciFi, it seems fairly prescient ....

nottorp 6mo ago

Hmm i'm curious how niche. Or ... how small can a community be and still be drowned in AI slop? Is it a community inside one of the major platforms, or it has its custom thing?

figassis 6mo ago

I may have a solution for you and could use some beta testers. Please reach out to me if you don't mind. Info on my profile.

figassis 6mo ago
It seems this is getting downvoted, no promotion. Understood, thanks for the reminder.

ricardobayes 6mo ago

I always find the most difficult is to deal with users who are not actively breaking any rules but are toxic and hurting the conversation. Given your experience, what's your take on handling this?

BoredPositron 6mo ago
In my experience it's okay to have some troll or odd users. If they do targeted campaigns against single users or small groups we ban them.
armchairhacker 6mo ago
Ban them. I also recommend making it explicit: your last rule should be “moderators have final discretion”. The hard part is figuring out when to apply rules leniently or strictly. For example, I think users should always be warned, then given shorter bans, before a long or perma ban (unless they break an obvious egregious rule, or they’re a suspected alt of a banned user). At the same time, you do need to kick out persistent rules lawyerers or they’ll drive away good users. Moderators shape their community. Hacker News is decent (compared to what it could be) because of dang and tomhow. Many communities (especially on Reddit) have become echo chambers, mainly because the mods are too happy to ban people for unspoken and/or vague rules.
- joe_mamba 6mo ago
  >Ban them. I also recommend making it explicit: your last rule should be “moderators have final discretion”.[...] >[...] Many communities (especially on Reddit) have become echo chambers mainly because the mods are too happy to ban people for unspoken and/or vague rules To me, it seems you're contradicting yourself here. In the first paragraph you suggest the solution to vague rules (mods having full authority), but then in the second paragraph you admit how that turns the platform into an echo chamber.
  - armchairhacker 6mo ago
    The point is to have discretion but use it rarely. Reddit echo chambers use it way too often. It’s not contradictory but unfortunately impossible to fully explain, otherwise it would be explicit rules. When someone acts borderline, you must intuit when they’re acting in good or bad faith. Hence I think a first warning, then short ban, is necessary for anyone not obviously breaking a rule; because the former will be careful, but the latter will keep acting borderline again and again, avoiding exactly what you warned about while still causing malice.

TitaRusell 6mo ago

There will soon be a point when you cannot even tell if the post comes from a human or AI model.

kijin 6mo ago
Don't worry, every country seems to be moving toward a future in which you need to present government ID to use any online service whatsoever. This will solve the problem of automated signups ... until AI models start getting valid government IDs, too. /s