Anubis is one such answer [0]. Cryptocurrency and micro transactions are another.
In the last few decades, spam was a problem because the marginal transaction costs of information exchange were orders of magnitude lower than they had been. Note that physical mail spam was, and still, is an issue. Focusing on perceptual or fuzzy computation as the limiting factor, through captchas and other 'human tests', allowed for most spam to be effectively mitigated.
Now that intelligence is becoming orders of magnitude cheaper, perceptual computation challenges no longer work, but we can still do computation challenges in the form of proof of work or proxies thereof. Spam will never wholly go away but we can at least cause more friction by charging bot networks to execute in the form of energy or money.
I don't see how Anubis solves anything. If a human lets the bot control a completely vanilla computer (which there is now a lot of tooling for), then how is it going to stop that?
You're right. My proposed solution only addressed AI at scale (web crawlers, mass spam campaigns, etc.) and doesn't address low bandwidth, "high friction" events like PRs, code reviews, blog posts, etc.
I don't want to dismiss the concerns outright and I'm not sure I have a concise response but my feeling is that, in some sense, it doesn't really matter. If AI is used to create a high quality output, then it should be accepted. If AI is creating low quality output, then it should be easy to verify, maybe with better (AI) tooling.
In other words, the bot problem cannot be solved, in that we might never know whether the source is from human or machine, but it won't matter as that's not the core of the problem, quality content is.
My opinion is that DIT is overstated and, where it isn't, we'll see much better technology evolve to separate the signal from the noise. As an analogy, in the late 1990s, internet search engines were abysmal, raking by document keyword searches and so were easily game-able by content that had nothing to do with the search intent. Google came along with page rank and, almost overnight, made the internet usable. From the bad Yahoo search results, one might be tempted to think that the entirety of the internet looked like what Yahoo was serving, but this was the wrong impression as there were plenty of interesting things on the internet, it just took page rank to provide the necessary filter to make the internet usable.
At most, PoW makes it a bit annoying to scale: you need to add some form of RPC that delegates solving to a beefy+cheap Hetzner server. If you're really scaling and it's getting expensive, you can rent a GPU to do batch solves.
Anubis is one such answer [0]. Cryptocurrency and micro transactions are another.
In the last few decades, spam was a problem because the marginal transaction costs of information exchange were orders of magnitude lower than they had been. Note that physical mail spam was, and still, is an issue. Focusing on perceptual or fuzzy computation as the limiting factor, through captchas and other 'human tests', allowed for most spam to be effectively mitigated.
Now that intelligence is becoming orders of magnitude cheaper, perceptual computation challenges no longer work, but we can still do computation challenges in the form of proof of work or proxies thereof. Spam will never wholly go away but we can at least cause more friction by charging bot networks to execute in the form of energy or money.
[0] https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis