itch.io

tl;dr your approach cannot detect and cannot prevent. You merely shift the housekeeping from the social media platform to your network. 

(social media sharing) so if you, a person I trust, share something signed by a person I don't, it won't register as verified

Most "posts" are not original content, but shared. If your solution blanket blocks almost everything, it will not be very useable in a social media situation.

A bad actor making an account must convince others to mark him as trusted and stay that way.

I hope you do realize how trivial it is to circumvent this. You are probably a nice and honest person. So you might lack the imagination a bad actor will have and the things a bad actor will come up with.

Would you pay a credit card bill that wasn't itemized because you otherwise trust the bank? Would you pay for a meal without looking at the receipt? We add a tech layer to trust all the time, you're just so used to them that they're invisible to us.

This is not the same type of trust. You are mixing trust in good intention with trust in acting without errors. And you are mixing up whom I would not trust. A bank usually is not out to scam customers (not in this way at least). But errors could happen, mostly because the billing is done by external third parties. So if I distrust a non itemized bill, it is not because I do not trust my bank, but because errors can happen and there are people scaming people with fake charges.

What are you refering to with "them" and "they" here? Are you talking about tech layers of trust or some concept like that? If so, that layer is not technical in nature, but the actual law. We generally trust that people obey the rules of the law and the rules of society. The problem is the exceptions, and you have to guard against those bad actors.

I get the concept of creating a gated community of nice people. But this does not scale up.

Creating a big tech layered network of people trusting people that trust people that can be trusted to be trusted by people trusting people that trust people will eventually approach a society model. And we already know that this does not work in actual society. You will have bad actors in that trust network that do damage before you can remove them. And if you cannot prevent the acts, the whole concept of the trust network is as good or as bad as the account integrity program of that network.

Social media platforms all already have account integrity programs, there's no need to invent my own

I think I just told you why you do need this, and that also implies why your's need to be better than the account integrity of the actual social media platform. Think about it. If your verification process is worse than that of, say, facebook, what is preventing the 10 million fake accounts per day to just infiltrate your network? We just established that you either do not have an integrity program at all or that your program is worse or equal than the actual account verification of a multi billion dollar company.

So to be of any use, you do need to offer something that the other platforms can not offer. You describe it as trust. But trust in what? Trust that members of the network do not post bad stuff. But for that, you need to have trust that these persons are persons and not fake accounts. How do you establish that? By removing the bad ones after the fact What you call self healing. But if you have to remove them, that means, they were able to make an account and enter the network.

The scammers and bad agents do not care if you remove them. You need to remove them before they can deliver their payload. If you remove them after, your network has achieved nothing, except make everything more complicated and mislead people into trusting the fake members of the network, undermining the trust in that network.

And this is the biggest issue with your concept: your approach cannot detect and cannot prevent. You merely shift the housekeeping from the social media platform to your network. 

who will promptly change their name or account and go on defrauding people. If trust follows you, reputation matters.
'Trust be, bro' doesn't cut it anymore. We're past that.

I do not know what that bro phrase means. And yes, reputation matters. That is why you do not buy assets for a non hobby project from an unknown source.                

(overengineering) It is not.

You propopse a method that would solve the issue of bot accounts, scammers, fake news and whatnot and want to use it to solve the purity issue of human made vs. ai made content in video games.

I do call that overengineering. And by citing the Claire Obscure thing, you have pointed out that your solution is not needed for that scenario. Reputation does matter. And trust me, because if I am cought lying I will face consequences on the platforms I publish is real and does cut it.

Sure, but that's just Trust Me, Bro. How much of it is AI generated? Can you verify that? Which voice actors provided which lines? Did you notice the AI-generated content that sneaked through QA in Claire Obscure? You know what would have caught it?

We are not talking about allergenes in food. And an AI hater will not care, how much AI is in it. Now you backpaddle and argue that you want to have percentages of ai content, rather than mark the game as having ai in it? Do you think that publisher lied about the game having ai in it, and it actually does not? Do you think the publisher lied about all the other games, but not about this?

Also, I have read about the Claire Obscure incident before writing my initial reply. It came up when searching for how the real world deals with the problem you are trying to solve. (With the method I called overengineered). The developers used prototype images made with ai. One of those prototype images was overlooked and made it to release and later was patched out. I would not exactly call that "content". And out of this, they constructed a case how the developer supposedly lied about using ai, and some jury took away an award ... and gave it to the follow up developer that did use ai - but said so. That's kinda a technical disqualification in a competition and not a developer scamming ai haters into buying a game full of ai content.

But pray tell me. How would your solution have dealt with this? Would the developer be removed from the trust network, for "sneaking in" ai "content"? Could your trust network have prevented it? Would you ship the game assets with the watermark header of human generated content and there would be a tech layer of trust between the player and the game on the computer, not rendering the game's images?

And how would this be integrated into Steam? You made a mock up screenshot how you imagine it. If Steam and the developer would adopt your network of trust approach, there would not even be a need for that button. No user interaction needed at all. Steam would automatically check the game against the ai disclosure. And I guess that is something they do by hand and assisted by technology. They do have a process of greenlighting games. You can't just publish anything you want there. They need to approve it. And if the approver sees typical ai content or signs of usage, and you claim you have no ai content, there will be trouble. Steam does has a reputation.