Can Worldcoin Fix The Internet's 99% Bot Problem? | Co-Founder Alex Blania
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I think the general headline is everything that we believe will work as a proof of human. We will also build ourselves and integrate into WorldID. So we're not, like, or maxis or anything. It's like, if it really is about getting to scale and about being inclusive and about working in a world of increasing powerful AI, I think the orb is actually the only way to get there.
Alex Blania is the cofounder of Worldcoin. Alex, welcome back to Bankless. Thanks
for having me. Excited to talk. It's been two years.
It has been two years. Almost exactly two years since we released an episode with you and Sam Altman. And, I I want to start by maybe asking a question about this because two years later, I feel like my social media experience hasn't gotten better. It's actually gotten worse. Like, the whole problem that you were talking about, which is, like, you won't be able to tell who's a human and who's a bot online, you you you were right about that. We're here. Yeah. And it's gotten, like, really bad. And I feel like AI is making all of this so much worse. AI has pretty much passed the Turing test with
think there's a couple of things. One first of all, I agree. I think the the kind of the AI general bot problem on social and and the Internet in general, I think, is gonna be a thing. But, like, even more importantly, I think we're still pretty early on that trajectory because I think if you now take, like, a a very competent open source agentic system or something like that, which I think we will see probably later in the year, if not early next year, I think you you will kind of another 10 x whatever we experience right now. So
it's gonna get way worse?
Way, way worse. Meaning, like, yeah, I think we will we're kind of heading to a place where way north of 99% of everything happening on the Internet will be AI driven, and that's, like, for, like, most things, I think that's gonna be amazing. You know? It's gonna be agents that do, like, all kinds of things for us. But I think for things like our social networks, these systems will be smarter than us. They will understand us better. They will know everything. And actually, there was like one very interesting paper that I think is like important to reference is like from the University of Zuric
Yeah. Our change my view subreddit. So there's a subreddit out there that's supposed to be, like, here's an opinion. I challenge you, other readers, to change my view. And what happened is that people you leveraged AI to provide compelling but also oftentimes false answers. Yes. And not only were, like, they extremely effective, but one of the reasons why they were effective is because the bots had the time of day. They had the patience and the ability to just write out long responses and to actually engage with the people, where, like, typical change my view post on that subreddit go mostly u
Right. And they even targeted on the people that made the comments. So, like, they kind of the AI was kind of tuned on the individual of like, what's their political view, how they did, what are the things they talked about before. So it's like it's very targeted towards you and can change your opinion. And I think that's like, that is something that will be pretty scary to us, I think, in the coming years where these systems will be smarter than us, they will know everything, they will be targeted to us, and can change our opinion. And I think we will really need a proof of human for many of
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