So we make AI to produce spam so that we need AI agents to filter the spam and reply to other people’s AI agents so that we don’t have to waste our own time and energy..?

Why would anyone want that future? There’s already more than enough technology getting between humans and having decent conversations.

In all seriousness I suspect that’s our present. How many people feed bullet points into ChatGPT and get it to write out full paragraphs, only for the recipient to take the paragraphs and ask ChatGPT to summarize them? We’ve invented a uniquely bloated data transmission format that exists just for appearances.

That’s a good point. What a distasteful waste of precious energy.

That future is already here. Replace "spam" with "job applications", for example.

There are ways of maintaining a chain of trust without losing total anonymity. For example DNS, email and Marshall Island companies. Karma systems and IP reputation can come into play too.

(I know the examples aren't truly anonymous, but they're all broadly comparable to using a Twitter without your real name).

The internet already isn't truly anonymous with how people actually use it. People are logged into a bunch of accounts that are traceable to them and also rarely mask their IP. With how much stuff I've paid for over the internet there's probably a double digit number of companies with my entire name and current address.

I just mean they may force you to share ID documents to make an account. I have trouble believing I would be anonymous at that point forward?

Five minutes later someone'll have an AI offering to make fake IDs.

Those will not be in the verification database.

What verification database? If I show you an Afghan passport, does the Taliban have an API to check it?

Social media is already a lot of spam and influence campaigns and people still use it. I think it'll keep chugging along as it has been with large amounts of spam and then AI to fight the spam.

If social media is read and written by agents, can we just put our phones down and get back to living in meatspace? Perhaps it's the best thing to ever happen to social media.

There are ways to combat spam that still allow for anonymity.

One example is proof-of-work. You can require a submission do 3-5 seconds worth of work on typical high end laptops/phones so that it becomes cost prohibitive for someone to post thousands of submissions an hour. There are ASIC resistant algorithms to prevent spam-for-hire services that might try to game the system.

Most users are passive consumers of content anyway so they wouldn't notice this process and when they want to post a few times per hour or day then the 5 seconds lag will be worth it to have a better social experience.