Sam Altman is best known as the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, but he’s got another project called ‘World’ that is suddenly directly relevant to the music industry.
Sharply summarised by Wired as “Sam Altman’s iris-scanning, humanity-verifying World project” in a recent article, the initiative describes itself as “full-stack proof of human”. And yes, that involves an app that scans your eyes to do the proving.
What’s the music relevance? A tool called Concert Kit that was unveiled at a conference in San Francisco last week with the slogan “concerts are for real fans, not bots”, and the promise of “exclusive pre-sales and ticket allocations for verified humans”.
Artists and their teams can reserve a portion of their tickets for this, with fans having to verify themselves using the World ID app to access the tickets using codes.
It was tested out on Friday with a free concert in San Francisco featuring ‘DJ Pee Wee’ (who is actually Anderson .Paak). Thirty Seconds to Mars are also using Concert Kit for some upcoming European dates, while VIP suites at some gigs in Bruno Mars’ world tour will also be included.
The launch announcement went with an “until now, there has been no reliable and privacy preserving way to confirm that a ticket buyer is actually a real human” line.
Is that true? Openstage is one firm that would energetically disagree, we suspect. Its Radiohead partnership was one of a growing number of deals with big artists to keep their tickets out of the hands (claws?) of bots.
That does involve collecting a lot of data on fans, which is possibly what the ‘privacy preserving’ bit of the World pitch is targeting.
Is letting artists that you like collect data on you more or less appealing to fans than scanning your iris (or taking a selfie, in the latest update) for an initiative led by one of the most powerful figures in AI tech? We’re about to find out.
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