In this episode of The Future Review, host Tracey Follows surveys the latest developments in digital identity, beginning with the launch of Worldcoin by Sam Altman. She critiques the project’s promise of a universal basic income tied to biometric proof‑of‑personhood, highlighting concerns about informed consent, privacy, and centralisation of iris‑scan data. The discussion references Vitalik Buterin’s analysis of proof‑of‑personhood approaches, contrasting social‑graph methods with biometric systems, and raises the challenge of deep‑fake attacks on identity verification. A clip with Andrew Budd of iProove introduces “Genuine Presence Assurance,” a biometric face‑verification solution aimed at detecting deepfakes and establishing trustworthy human presence in both physical and virtual spaces. The episode then shifts to synthetic avatars, featuring Ian Crocombe of Superheroic. Crocombe explains how his team trains marketers to use generative AI, and details a collaborative project with Tracey to create TF14 – a personalised AI avatar built using Midjourney for visual generation, D‑ID for animation, and ElevenLabs for voice cloning. They discuss practical marketing use‑cases such as AI‑generated personas, rapid content creation, and customer‑service avatars, as well as broader cultural experiments with synthetic actors. Crocombe forecasts a tiered future for AI‑augmented creativity: handcrafted premium work at the top, fully AI‑generated low‑cost output at the bottom, and a middle ground where AI acts as a junior partner to human creators. The episode concludes with contact information for Superheroic and a call‑to‑action for listeners. Key take‑aways: 1. Worldcoin exemplifies the tension between economic opportunity and privacy/centralisation in biometric identity schemes. 2. Deepfakes pose a real threat to identity verification, prompting new biometric assurance technologies. 3. Synthetic avatars are becoming practical tools for marketers, enabling scalable personal presence and new creative workflows. 4. The AI‑augmented creative landscape is likely to stratify, with humans retaining a pivotal role in higher‑value contexts while AI handles volume work.
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Welcome to this briefing episode on The Future of You. As regular listeners know, these briefings allow me to cover a few of the topical stories around identity popping up in the week. Today we cover the launch of Worldcoin, pros and cons of is-a-person solutions, security threats around biometrics, and we have an interview with Ian Crocombe of Superheroic on how to build your synthetic self. Worldcoin is one of the areas that has popped up this week. We've covered it before on the pod, but it became news because it was officially launched by Sam Altman. Altman was quoted as saying, "Worldcoin could drastically increase economic opportunity and scale a reliable solution for distinguishing humans from AI online, all whilst preserving privacy." So what does that word salad really mean? Well, it means that we are one step closer to a potentially dystopian crypto future which offers you money in exchange for your identity. It all ties into the so-called utopian concept of Universal Basic Income, where, as you know, citizens are paid a set amount of money, like a salary direct from the government really, regardless of their means. Socialism writ large in a society led by productive machines, effectively. For years, Altman has been testing this out on the citizens of Africa, and now he claims to have 2 million people added to the Worldcoin crypto database. Mostly across Africa, India, and South Africa. But one wonders how many people did so under conditions of informed consent. Did they really understand what they were consenting to? Do they really understand what happens to their identity data now? I'm not sure anyone on the planet would understand this, to be honest. Nevertheless, Worldcoin has plans to roll out 1,500 of their futuristic orbs that scan the iris of each person in return for a unique number that entitles the victim to 25 Worldcoins. This is one of the reasons I wrote The Future of You. I could see digitisation of identity coming and that proof of personhood would be an important element to underpinning access to, well, everything done digitally, including public services. Vitalik Buterin wrote a long piece turning over the pros and cons of various approaches to proof of personhood. And in it he critiqued Worldcoin as a potential solution. He spends a long time in the article talking about what proof of personhood is, but for those regular listeners on here, you will have heard episodes with Dave Birch, Cameron D'Ambrosi, Kalea Young, Andy Tobin, and others, and you already know what it is, and you already know there's a difference between "is a person" and "is that person." He makes the distinction between social graph-based systems and biometric systems. Worldcoin, of course, being the latter— and then captures the issue in a nutshell. The Orb hardware system can potentially do a better job of protecting privacy, but it also introduces much greater centralization into the system. The piece is an excellent read, and by the time you get to the end of it, you're once again mulling over these, these trade-offs that litter the issues of verification and authentication around identity, the same ones that we see again and again. What are we happy to give up? And what are the deal-breakers? There's a section on how we deal with fake people, and he remarks that an in-person scan is quite hard to fake compared to deepfaking a video. He means specialised hardware is harder to fool than digital algorithms verifying pictures and videos. Now, this is an issue that I discuss in the next episode with Andrew Budd. Founder CEO of iProove, the world leader in biometric face verification. Deepfakes do present a threat, and Andrew actually tells me about their solution. It's called Genuine Presence Assurance, a way to better detect deepfakes. He believes that this will become the fundamental root of trust, helping to deliver the human right of secure and privacy-protecting digital identity verification to people all around the world. Here's a snippet from the next episode.
So again, this is a world in which we have the potential of having extremely realistic agents of ourselves potentially interacting with each other. And how the hell are we going to know whether they're real or not? And it's going to matter because there is a real difference between the genuinely present person and an avatar. And that's going to come back to the assurance of genuine presence. I, I now believe that our ability to distinguish between a genuine, between a real human being. You know, in the end, trust doesn't reside in verifiable credentials, Tracey. Trust resides in the stuff that goes on between our ears and the ability to demonstrate to a high degree of probability that the interaction you are having is with a real human being, a real thinking, personally accountable human being will become fundamental not just to avoid fraud and money laundering, but societal stability. And we will find that in the metaverse, as in real life, as in a world of generative AI, the ability, the issuer of the certificate of genuineness will become one of the key sources of trust in the entire economy. And that's kind of the role that we see developing for us and our industry.
Speaking of avatars and agents, I wrote a piece in Forbes this week about how I, along with the team at SuperHeroic, built TF14, the first of my AI entourage, now trusted to leave the house and carry out some tasks on my behalf. In the most recent episode, we also chatted with Matthew Kershaw of DID.com, about the business of digital people and how they will become integrated into our lives as well as our businesses. Well, here you can listen to Ian Crocombe talk in detail about how we worked together on TF14, what we were trying to achieve with this synthetic self, and how synthetic representations of ourselves is going to change the game.
So Superheroic is something we set up for marketers over the last year, and we help marketing teams build generative AI capabilities that they can use within their business. So a lot of the initial work is training and consulting that we've done. So I think we've trained about 600 people now and we tend to train networks of people. So we did some stuff for Publicis Network in Ireland a couple of weeks ago. We're doing a Marketing Academy session in August. We did the Liberty Guild yesterday. So yeah, so we're basically training networks of marketers and our goal in that is to empower people with the confidence to use AI in their daily practice.
So what's a use case that a marketeer would come to you with specifically, or don't they really know? And that's what you're trying to work out for them.
From the stuff that we've done, we obviously, we measure everything and we can see the core challenge that marketers have got at the moment, whether the beginning of their journey is fear. They're frightened about talking about AI. There's a lack of clarity around things like copyright. There's a lack of clarity around legals for some of the things around data. So people are just a bit frightened. So we just wanted to remove that fear and empower people to use AI. Every day in what they do.
What would be an example of something you couldn't do before? What have you done that you couldn't do before through these tools?
Well, it's quite interesting. I mean, I work as a— I run a consultancy, so we consult with businesses. I also work as a VP of strategy for businesses and also interim marketing director for other businesses. So I sit across a bunch of different roles at the moment. So as a strategist, I've got my hands in the clay. Working in the silicon mines looking for insights, you know. So we worked on a project last week where I generated for a pizza company 8 extreme personas. So these would be personas that wouldn't necessarily come out of UX interviews or out of primary research, but I scraped 700 customer reviews from Trustpilot, from the Google App Store, from Yelp in different cities across the US, and I used these to build extreme use case personas. And so then I could feed these into the creative teams and they're like, well, that's interesting. And all personas are really more granular and more functional. These are basically people who want to order a pizza at 2 in the morning or can never agree what's going on because their kids argue. They were just really great jumping off points. So I think using AI for inspiration as a partner to jam with is what's there for strategists. And the opportunities are big. I always say to people, you know, you should be able to free up an hour of your day using these tools to get a bit more done. And you should be able to do things you couldn't do before. Those are the two things that I'm always trying to do. And then I guess also we work with creative teams a lot. I mean, as a— I work as a planner in agencies and I also work, you know, with creatives in my own business and also work with other creative teams in training as well. And what's interesting is creatives are grasping the idea that the means of production are shifting away from having to go out to different specialists to make stuff.. And so you can make a short film, you can create a pitch concept, you can make a storyboard in faster ways with higher fidelity and without having to pull other resource in. So I think you're kind of, you know, our proposition's superheroic, you know, but I do think that you are giving people these kind of superhuman powers. Basically what we've basically seen is that commercially available platforms like D-ID, and you spoke to Matt Kershaw last week, And also Synthesia, who we met Victor a couple of years ago when, when they were still raising money, but they're, they're huge now. These companies are basically building commercially available synth platforms that are really easy to use. So rather than someone coming to your customer service page and having to read the FAQs, they can basically build an avatar that will go from text to voice and talk you through the FAQs. So there's this kind of customer service angle, I guess. They're used a lot for things in commercially, they're used a lot for like B2B communications, customer service, and also for kind of basic marketing use cases where you want to bring something to life a little bit more, particularly education, things like that. What you can see is when you use a synth, people spend more time with it, they'll review things and they're more emotionally engaged, they're more likely to learn. So that's the kind of commercial normal use of it. Obviously, as creative people, we're like, okay, what can we do that's slightly, um, crazy, and how could we bend this to do interesting things with culture? So I've been working with Noughts and Derek at The Peeps, who are creative technologists who are partners on this as well. We started to do things last year like, um, use synthetic actors in ads. So we did a campaign for Bower Collective where we created a fake recycling spokesperson who was a deepfake, and that was the kind of joke as well. So we've been playing with this a lot. What I've started to do is to build synths of myself who can act as not quite an autonomous agent, but can effectively scale my presence. So for example, if someone can send an email to me, I'll have it hooked up to my CRM. I can send them a short video message back, and that video message could be my synth.
Tell our listeners a little bit about how we made TF14.
We were talking about the work that you were doing as a futurist and how you were showing up, and we came back with the idea of, you know, how could we create a bespoke branded synth that could project your knowledge in new places and in different ways and also explore this future of identity.
And what were the tools that we used? I think you said it was Midjourney and we used ElevenLabs, didn't we? And, and of course, then D-ID.com as the platform.
So, you know, that first piece that we did, which is a consultation where we talked about cultural references, film references, use cases for a synth that you had, that gave us that really strong strategic brand platform almost. So it felt very much like our old world of advertising that we were doing. And then once you have that, Tracey, we were able to then fuel that and use that as input to go into Midjourney, which is the core tool that we use for the visualisation. So to take your images of yourself, portraits of you as a seed, and then to fuse them with the cultural references that we talked about to build that image. And I think as Nort said, you've got 50 different potential images and you settled on the 14th, Tracey Follows 14, or TF14 as it's now called romantically. So once we have that static image, the next thing that we'll do is we'll use D-ID as a platform. Synthesia works in a similar way, but we're very close with Matt over at D-ID and we use the platform a lot. I think that Noughts and Derek are one of the, were one of the top 3 makers of avatars at one point in Europe. So we would basically take that image and then we'd use a soundtrack to animate it. So a way a lot of these AI films work is that you have a, you have like a core image and then you have a driver video which animates it. And that's the way that you do deepfakes as well. So we could basically take a piece of audio you'd recorded, so it could be a clip from a podcast, or it could just be a 1-minute message to somebody, put that into D-ID, as you know, and then animate that and make that into a video. So that's the kind of core simple use case. And what we know is really strong audio tricks the brain into thinking things are real. So I know that your stuff's recorded beautifully using all your podcast studio equipment as well, but that actually tricks the brain and it feels more real. Which is really exciting. And there's tons of other stuff that we can do with them. We also use a tool called ElevenLabs, which is for voice cloning. So I've cloned my own voice. If I can't be bothered to record something or it's a bit noisy, I can go text-to-speech and it gives you a voice which is 80% like me with a little American twang at the end, which is great. So that's good. So you can do text-to-speech in your own voice now, which is super useful as well. And then I guess now it's about exploring the use cases. Where can your synths show up? How can it represent you?
Ian, where do you think this is all going to be in sort of, I don't know, 5 to 7 years' time? Are we going to have avatars dealing with avatars or AI agents dealing with AI agents and the humans out of the loop? Or is the human always going to be, if not in control, somewhere in the background in that loop?
It's a brilliant question. If I think about marketing, which is my kind of where I get paid, I think about it a bit like a pyramid. So at the top of the pyramid, you're going to have artisan, handcrafted stuff for the Burberrys of the world, which has never seen a computer. It's going to be done with pencil. It's going to be carved. It's going to be physical and analog because that's premium. Yeah. It's not going to have seen an AI and that's going to feel differentiated and interesting and we're going to relate to it. At the bottom of the pyramid, you're going to have Chinese dropshippers. Who are, you know, even when I worked at Facebook, we saw people in Greater China with 80,000 ads in their account for gaming companies. And these were all generated by AI. No human had ever seen them. No human had probably even interacted with them. But it's just this, you know, you're gonna have at the bottom of the pyramid, you're gonna have AI-generated, you know, the equivalent of pound shop creativity, I guess. And then I think in the middle, which is where I generally play, you're gonna have this AI-augmented, human experience. So it's going to be humans, just like accountants started using Excel to speed up their work, marketers are going to be using AI tools to speed up their work and get them to do more as well. So you'll have this blend of things. But this year, definitely the thought is that you use AI as an assistant or as like a junior partner to jam with, and then the human then finishes that and takes it on. So, I mean, ChatGPT, I'll be honest with you now, for me is a bit like a more interesting version Google. That's how I use it within my strategy practice.
And if people are interested in this, marketing or otherwise, how do they get in touch with you, Ian?
So you can find me on LinkedIn at Ian Crocombe. You can have a little Google for me, or you can go to superheroic.co, which is our kind of hub for all of our AI creative technology work. And we've got training, consulting, our synth boutique, of which you are the first customer, and also creative technologies where we do a lot of campaign work.
Brilliant. Thanks for joining me today.
Thank you, Tracey.
Thank you for listening to The Future Review hosted by me, Tracey Follows. Check out the show notes for more info about the topics covered in this episode. Do like and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you know someone you think will enjoy this episode, please do share it with them. Visit thefuturereview.com futureofyou.co.uk for more on the future of identity in a digital world, and futuremade.consulting for the future of everything else. The Future of You podcast is produced by Big Tent Media.
