AI innovator and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sees a big problem on the horizon: As AI becomes more and more intelligent, how can anyone tell the humans from the bots? Altman’s World project thinks it has a solution. WSJ’s Angus Berwick unpacks the plan and explores some of the problems that have cropped up during the rollout. Annie Minoff hosts. Sign up for WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Why is there a new store in San Francisco scanning eyeballs?
Last week, a new storefront opened in San Francisco. Our producer Sophie Codner was there. And what brought you into the store today?
I heard about this store on news and social media. It sounded a bit mysterious, and I really wanted to find out exactly what's going on. I'm not sure if I still do know exactly what's going on, but it's an interesting concept from what I could gather.
Nothing's sold at this store. And what's actually going on inside sounds pretty sci-fi. People are getting their eyes, specifically their irises, scanned by a device called the orb.
What are your impressions of the orb? You know when you're not ready for the future, but it's now? It's that feeling. It's that feeling.
The orbs are metallic spheres about the size of volleyballs. Inside each one, there's a camera taking high-definition pictures of people's eyes. The goal is to create individualized online IDs for each person based on the unique patterns in their eyes. Did you get your eye scanned?
I did. Yes. Yes, I did.
Okay, how'd it go?
Pretty seamless, actually. It was quick. A minute, two minutes, and I was in.
All this eye scanning is part of a project called World. It's the brainchild of Sam Altman, the tech visionary and CEO of OpenAI. In Altman's view, what's happening in this San Francisco storefront could be part of the solution to a pressing problem, how to tell humans and AI apart.
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Chapter 2: What is Sam Altman's World project?
We needed a way that we could know what content was made by a human, by an AI. The initial ideas were very crazy. Then we came down to one that was just a little bit crazy, which became world.
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Annie Minoff. It's Friday, May 9th. Coming up on the show, Sam Altman's global project to tell man from machine. Have you seen one of these orbs or touched one?
Yeah, unfortunately, I have not seen one physically, and I have not yet scanned my iris. So currently, there is no way to be assured that I am the real Angus Barak.
My colleague Angus Barak has been following Sam Altman's eye scanning project. As the CEO of OpenAI, Altman's had a front-row seat to AI advances, including helping to create chatbots like ChatGPT that sound a whole lot like humans. And that's where Altman saw a potential problem.
I think he saw that we were going to reach a point in the future where AI and technology would be so advanced that we wouldn't really be able to distinguish it from humans, you know, and particularly kind of in an online setting. So, you know, that could apply to bots on social media or deepfake people on video calls, etc.
How far away did he think that future was? Because it almost feels like it's here.
I think what's most surprised me is how quickly this kind of Terminator-esque world is sort of arriving. Well, you know, we don't have the Terminator walking around, fortunately. But yeah, the internet is a kind of drastically different place to how it was a couple of years ago.
And I think this issue of kind of distinguishing man from machine is just becoming kind of very pressing across so many different parts of our society and economy.
This man or machine problem has come up in all sorts of areas. On social media, in online dating, e-commerce, education, and gaming.
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Chapter 3: How does the orb technology work to identify humans?
AI fakes are also becoming a problem in banking.
I think the sophistication of deep fakes now has reached a point that they can bypass like a bank or kind of financial firms, like customer checks, which typically rely on comparing your passport photo with like a scan of your face.
Altman says he wanted to help solve this problem. And to do it, he co-founded World.
We wanted a way to make sure that humans stayed special and central in a world where the internet was going to have lots of AI-driven content.
Obviously, the irony was that he was probably the foremost figure driving us toward this future as well. You know, I think people have said that he has the virus on one hand and the antidote on the other.
So how does World plan to identify real humans on the internet? That is where the orbs come in. How does that process work? How does the scan happen?
So there's an ultra high definition camera kind of loaded inside one of this orb, a shiny object about the size of a kind of basketball. Then you would stare into the orb's camera. It would capture this image of your iris. And then what the orb then does is that it converts that image into an immutable code. And that code is then kind of unique to you as an individual.
World says it then deletes the pictures of your eye. The only thing it says it retains is that individualized code. That iris code can then link to something called a world ID, basically your online proof of humanness. I mean, isn't this just a fancy social security number? Like, why is it better than a passport or a password?
So I think what they say is that the problem with, you know, for instance, like a passport or your kind of social security number is that that's kind of bound to the kind of confines of your nation. And I think that, you know, they want a global solution that can be recreated anywhere around the world.
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Chapter 4: Why does the world need a new form of identification?
So you would be tagged, for instance, on Reddit or on a dating site or on a shopping site or a social media site, and you would then be tagged as a verified... Verified human. A verified human, exactly. And if I'm speaking with you and your world ID, I can be confident that you're not a bot who is out to trick me.
But World had a problem. How to get people to stand in front of an orb and get their eyeballs scanned.
For a lot of people, staring into this orb and allowing it to scan my eye isn't the most enticing prospect.
But World had a solution for that, too. It would give people a little extra incentive to get scanned. The project developed its own cryptocurrency called WorldCoin.
They have their own token called WLD.
If you agree to get your eye scanned, you become eligible to claim some free WorldCoin. WorldCoin's value fluctuates based on trading.
When the project was launching, one WLD token was worth around $10. And I think so that people were receiving potentially up to about $100 just to participate in this.
Worlds had a vision, a technology, and a hook to get people to sign up. Now, it just had to start scanning people's eyes. That's next.
Hey, we're so excited for tonight. Before we come over, though, may I ask if there are any unlocked guns in your home?
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Chapter 5: How does World incentivize people to participate?
I think there was an infamous case in which thousands of people swarmed this WorldCoin site at this convention center in Nairobi. These huge queues of people spilling out onto the roads. And I think there was a huge degree of intrigue.
There was also quite a lot of excitement about it, in part because people were able to receive these payouts of the cryptocurrency, which they could then swap for actual cash.
Governments in some of those countries, though, were less than thrilled.
They were kind of caught off guard and were learning that there were troops of orb operators heading through their communities with the orbs in tow.
World says that orbs currently delete photos of participants' eyes. But in some countries, World has allowed people to later opt in and share their eye photos with the project to help train its algorithms. That has raised some issues. Hong Kong, for example, banned World after finding it was retaining iris images for up to a decade.
Authorities in Argentina accused World of having abusive user terms and launched investigations into it. And in Spain, officials accused the project of scanning children's eyes. Let's talk about some of the main concerns. What issues have critics raised with this project?
The main concerns has been that, you know, effectively you could potentially have a private company collecting very kind of sensitive biometric data of people all around the world. And if a database like that could ever be compromised, that would expose a lot of very sensitive data. biometric data.
And I think the problem with biometric data, unlike, you know, for instance, like a passport is, you know, once an image of my iris, once that that's been kind of released publicly, I can't like get another one. You can't change your iris. So you're kind of now perpetually vulnerable to identity theft.
Alex Blania is a co-founder of The World Project. I asked him about some of the pushback that it's received. What's your response to governments who have been uncomfortable with how you've rolled this out in the past?
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