Keynote Talks

The New Scarcity: Human Judgment in a World of AI-Generated Content

Edgar Weippl
University of Vienna, Austria

Abstract

Large language models make it cheap to produce polished text, code, applications, reviews, objections, and complaints. The bottleneck, therefore, moves from production to human judgment. Journals, grant agencies, universities, companies, and public administrations may face a denial-of-service problem at the human and organizational layer: too many plausible artifacts requiring careful assessment. This keynote frames the issue as layer-8 denial-of-service and asks how institutions can protect human attention without sacrificing openness, fairness, and privacy. I discuss proof of human time, rate limits, accountable pseudonyms, and proof of useful work as possible building blocks for resilient institutions.

Biography Edgar Weippl is a Full Professor for Security and Privacy at the University of Vienna and Vice Dean of the Faculty of Computer Science. He is also the Research Director of SBA Research and a visiting professor at the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo. His research areas include software security. Edgar is a senior associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, associate editor for ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security, and IFIP TC11 liaison to Computers & Security. He is Austria’s representative at IFIP TC 11 for Security and Privacy in Information Processing Systems.