Fighting AI fakes with blockchain: Real AI & crypto use cases, No. 4

Published

1 year ago

November 30, 2023

admin

We’re rolling out one genuine use case for AI and crypto each day this week — including reasons why you shouldn’t necessarily believe the hype. Today: How blockchain can fight the fakes.

Generative AI is extremely good at generating fake photos, fake letters, fake bills, fake conversations — fake everything. Near co-founder Illia Polosukhin warns that soon, we won’t know which content to trust.

“If we don’t solve this reputation and authentication of content (problem), shit will get really weird,” Polosukhin explains. “You’ll get phone calls, and you’ll think this is from somebody you know, but it’s not.”

“All the images you see, all the content, the books will be (suspect). Imagine a history book that kids are studying, and literally every kid has seen a different textbook — and it’s trying to affect them in a specific way.”

Blockchain can be used to transparently trace the provenance of online content so that users can distinguish between genuine content and AI-generated images. But it won’t sort out truth from lies.

“That’s the wrong take on the problem because people write not-true stuff all the time. It’s more a question of when you see something, is it by the person that it says it is?” Polosukhin says.

“And that’s where reputation systems come in: OK, this content comes from that author; can we trust what that author says?”

“So, cryptography becomes an instrument to ensure consistency and traceability and then you need reputation around this cryptography — on-chain accounts and record keeping to actually ensure that ‘X posted this’ and ‘X is working for Cointelegraph right now.’”

Seriously, don’t trust anything you see online anymore. Faking stuff is trivial. You cannot tell the difference. There are no watermarks, and watermarks can be defeated easily. This genie is not going back in the bottle.

— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) November 27, 2023

If it’s such a great idea why isn’t anyone doing it already?

There are a variety of existing supply chain projects that use blockchain to prove the provenance of goods in the real world, including VeChain and OriginTrail.

However, content-based provenance has yet to take off. The Trive News project aimed to crowdsource article verification via blockchain, while the Po.et project stamped a transparent history of content on the blockchain, but both are now defunct

More recently, Fact Protocol was launched, using a combination of AI and Web3 technology in an attempt to crowdsource the validation of news. The project joined the Content Authenticity Initiative in March last year

When somebody shares an article or piece of content online, it is first automatically validated using AI and then fact-checkers from the protocol set out to double-check it and then record the information, along with timestamps and transaction hashes, on-chain.

Is blockchain needed?

Technically, no. One of the issues hamstringing this use case is that you actually don’t need blockchain or crypto to prove where a piece of content came from. However, doing so makes the process much more robust.

So, while you could use cryptographic signatures to verify content, Polosukhin asks how the reader can be certain it is the right signature? If the key is posted on the originating website, someone can still hack that website.

Web2 deals with these issues by using trusted service providers, he explains, “but that breaks all the time.”

“Symantec was hacked, and they were issuing SSL certificates that were not valid. Websites are getting hacked — Curve, even Web3 websites are getting hacked because they run on a Web2 stack,” he says.

“So, from my perspective, at least, if we’re looking forward to a future where this is used in malicious ways, we need tools that are actually resilient to that.”

Don’t believe the hype

People have been discussing this use case for blockchain to fight “disinformation” and deep fakes long before AI took off, and there has been little progress until recently.

Microsoft has just rolled out its new watermark to crack down on generative AI fakes being used in election campaigns. The watermark from the Coalition for Content Provenance Authenticity is permanently attached to the metadata and shows who created it and whether AI was involved.

The New York Times, Adobe, the BBC, Truepic, Washington Post and Arm are all members of C2PA. However, the solution doesn’t require the use of blockchain, as the metadata can be secured with hashcodes and certified digital signatures.

That said, it can also be recorded on blockchain, as Reuter’s pilot program in August demonstrated. And the awareness arm of C2PA is called the Content Authenticity Initiative, and Web3 outfits, including Rarible, Fact Protocol, Livepeer and Dfinity, are CAI members flying the flag for blockchain.

Also read:

Real AI use cases in crypto, No. 1: The best money for AI is crypto
Real AI use cases in crypto, No. 2: AIs can run DAOs
Real AI use cases in crypto, No. 3: Smart contract audits & cybersecurity

Andrew Fenton

Based in Melbourne, Andrew Fenton is a journalist and editor covering cryptocurrency and blockchain. He has worked as a national entertainment writer for News Corp Australia, on SA Weekend as a film journalist, and at The Melbourne Weekly.

Follow the author @andrewfenton

Politics

‘It’s a smash and grab raid on the constitution’: The last of the hereditary peers

Published

12 hours ago

January 2, 2025

admin

'It's a smash and grab raid on the constitution': The last of the hereditary peers

For centuries an odd tradition lay dormant in our democracy.

A number of nobleman have had the chance to sit in parliament, simply by birthright – 92 seats in the House of Lords are eligible to male heirs in specific families and 88 men have taken these seats and currently sit in the second chamber to vote on legislation.

It is not known exactly when this quirk in our parliamentary system started but Sir Keir Starmer‘s government is trying to end it.

The prime minister has said that the right to sit in the second chamber bestowed at birth is an “indefensible” principle and his government have started the process to end hereditary peers for good.

It will mean that those with hereditary peerages will have to be part of the process that gets them voted out of a job they had previously been entitled to for the rest of their life.

The last of the hereditaries

We meet the Earl of Devon who has one of the oldest hereditary peerages.

He can trace his family title back to the Saxons, but the right to sit in the House of Lords came much later – he says granted in 1142 for supporting the first female sovereign, Empress Matilda.

He is the 38th Earl of Devon since then and the last to sit in the Lords as a hereditary.

His castle in Devon places him in touch with the community he represents – it is one of the main reasons he feels strongly that he adds value to parliament.

He argues he and his peers bring a certain life experience with them that the political appointees do not.

He says there is a greater regional representation within the UK and he has a deeper understanding of the historical constitutional workings of parliament that comes from passing knowledge from generation to generation.

“I certainly feel that the role that the hereditary peers play in the House of Lords is exemplary,” he says.

He greatly defends the idea of service that he and his peers strive for but he also says there is a social purpose and social value to the hereditary principle as the monarch is the epitome of it.

“I don’t think that Keir Starmer is a republican but it does beg the question of once the hereditaries go is the king next,” he says.

By contrast, Lord Strathclyde has one of the newest hereditary peerages.

He has not only participated fully as a member of the Lords but also served in previous Conservative governments in senior roles.

He believes this latest intervention by the government is a purely political move.

“I think the real reason why the government wants to get rid of them is because most of them are not members of the Labour Party,” he says.

“So it’s a smash and grab raid on the constitution. Get rid of your opponents and allow the prime minister to control who entered the House of Lords.

“I can guarantee you that once this bill is through and becomes law, there will be no further reform of the House of Lords no matter what ministers say.”

It is true that over half of hereditary peers are Conservatives and astonishingly few are Labour – there are only four.

But removing the hereditaries doesn’t change the composition of the Lords all that much.

The Lords is 70% men, which would only drop 3% once these peers are removed, and the percentage of Conservative peers overall in the house only drops by 2% if all the hereditaries leave overnight.

Broader Reform

Reform has been talked about since the 1700s when there was an attempt to cap the size of the swollen chamber now at more than 800 members.

But despite successive governments promising reform, the House has only got larger.

Hereditary peers have long maintained that once the government passes this first stage of reform they will be less motivated by other opportunities to modernise the second chamber.

In 1999, Blair culled the amount of hereditary peerages (having previously promised to get rid of them all).

While 650 departed, a deal was struck for 92 to remain with replacements when these peers died or retired and filled by a bizarre system of byelections, where the only eligible candidates were hereditary peers.

The current leader of the Lords, Baroness Smith, says the elections are a bizarre, almost shameful part of our democracy and compares them to the Dunny-on-the-Wold in Blackadder where there is only one eligible voter in the entire constituency.

While the government’s aim to abolish these peerages has finally stepped up a gear, it is also true that Labour has watered down promises on broader reform in the Lords.

Pre-election, it had floated the idea of abolishing the second chamber altogether.

In the manifesto the party modified that to instead reducing the scale of the Lords through a retirement age, but that was not in the King’s speech and no timeline for those objectives has been given by the government.

Baroness Smith insists these are still commitments and the government is currently looking at how to implement them, though it does seem to be moving at a much slower pace than this first stage of removing the hereditary peers who, it seems, will hang up their ancient robes for good at the end of this parliamentary session.