World, the ambitious biometric identity verification project co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and formerly known as Worldcoin, made its debut in the UK this month. The venture, which uses a distinctive spherical eye-scanning device known as the Orb, which distinguishes between real people and AI bots, helping to verify who is human online, is now available in London, with plans to expand into other major UK cities including Manchester, Birmingham, Cardiff, Belfast, and Glasgow in the coming months.
World’s Orb device aims to combat the growing threat of fraudulent activities perpetrated by artificial intelligence systems, such as deepfakes. The technology operates by scanning a person’s face and iris to generate a unique code, verifying that the individual is a genuine human and not an AI.
Once an individual’s iris code is created, they are rewarded with Worldcoin’s native WLD cryptocurrency and gain access to an anonymous identifier called World ID, which can be used to sign into various applications, including popular platforms like Minecraft, Reddit, and Discord.
Since its initial launch as “Worldcoin” in 2021, Altman’s project has faced ongoing concerns regarding user privacy. The startup asserts that it addresses these issues by encrypting the collected biometric data and ensuring the deletion of the original data. Worldcoin’s verification system relies on a decentralised network of users’ smartphones rather than a centralised cloud to conduct individual identity checks.
While scaling this approach to networks with billions of users, like Facebook or TikTok, presents challenges, Worldcoin currently boasts 13 million verified users and has ambitious plans for further expansion.
Having launched in the US in May, Orbs have been installed in various public spaces, such as shopping centres and on the high street, allowing people to use them as they would an ATM.
Adrian Ludwig, chief architect at Tools For Humanity, told The Financial Times (FT): “The UK is certainly one of the more influential markets in the world … it punches well above its weight globally. [The UK population] is significantly online [and] is already well aware of the impact AI is going to have. In the UK over 75% of citizens speak to having been [impacted] by AI on nearly a daily basis.”
According to Tools For Humanity, within two years more than 90% of online content will be machine generated, which will mean it could be almost impossible to distinguish computers from people, making Orbs and World IS essential to prevent fraud and identity theft.
Image source: World.org
