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This does seem somewhat likely. Although I hope there will be forms of online interaction that are more verifiably human-only - in that the cost of infiltrating with AI will be not infinite, but high enough that few will bother. Online chess survives, but only because tools exist that are pretty reliable for detecting chess engine usage. These tools aren't undefeatable, but they're sufficient. Maybe we'll replace text posts with TikTok posts, or something (YES, I can see you shuddering).
I share your hope but I'm not optimistic. I think a big part of the reason online chess survives is that a lot of people play at fast time controls so that it's difficult for (c)heaters to enter moves into the chess engine. Even now, a skilled programmer could probably set something up so that moves are picked up automatically and entered into chess engine. I think it's likely that AI will make it easy for anyone to create such cheatware.
The other big way that (c)heaters are caught is that their moves are compared to the outputs of the big chess engines. If a player's moves are either (1) substantially the same as those of a major chess engine; or (2) consistently among the top few suggestions of the big chess engines, then it's a strong indication that the player is (c)heating. Again, this seems like something a skilled programmer could get around. And that therefore, in the near future it's likely to be pretty easy to create a program which fixes these issues. Possibly it would be just a matter of feeding 40 or 50 of one's past games into the system and telling the AI to create a chess engine which plays in the same style but simulates skill increasing steadily over the next year or two and ultimately reaching grandmaster level.
I suspect that using a computer to "cheat," so to speak, in online debates would be even easier. And it would surely be tempting for many people to have a system which farms karma points while one sleeps and which grinds one's opponents down without doing the work of actually reading their posts and drafting responses. Especially if they suspect other people are doing something similar.
I'm tempted to say that AI will likely offer ways to circumvent this as well, but I think it's too early to say.
Yeah, my point is that you don't need perfect verification, you just need to make the bar high enough that the random trolls (bored idiots who pop in and play their first 20 games throwing all the moves into an engine) aren't going to bother. Even today, people can still get away with cheating at chess online, but they have to put effort into making it more believable. If you just want to play decent human-level chess, you can trust that your average experience online will be decent - you won't be sure the other player never cheated, but you can expect to play a good game, not just be stomped by ganjaboy420 and his ELO 3000 playstyle.
Relevant xkcd.
That xkcd has always been stupid. Before AIs, people kept bringing it up in the context of "if we can get the trolls to post things that don't violate the rules, shouldn't we be fine with trolls?" Trolls can do things that don't violate any rules, but which cumulatively have bad effects that are not accounted for by the rules; it's a form of Goodharting. And it's very hard to make a rule that exactly covers the kind of damage their posts cause.
Also, in that xkcd the system to detect helpful AIs is rating comments. We know how rating comments goes, and it 1) has flaws and 2) does NOT lead to all the comments actually being helpful, particularly when AIs are involved (check any subreddit infested by bots).
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Ok, and I think there's a pretty good chance that AI will make it super-easy to get over such bars.
I would have to disagree with the (apparent) point of this comic strip. Let's suppose that we get to the point where 95% of the comments on this message board are machine-generated with little or no human input. Let's further suppose that all of these comments fully comply with all the rules. They are charitable; polite; and so on. Even so, I am pretty sure I would lose interest in participating.
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