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If there’s a technological solution that could, somehow, provide a ubiquitous means of walking back from image discovered on the internet through the whole chai

If there’s a technological solution that could, somehow, provide a ubiquitous means of walking back from image discovered on the internet through the whole chain of custody to either a specific camera or a specific prompt, then yes there’s definitely a market and a need for that in society, and both the market and the need are going to be substantially greater, even after this AI-summer collapses, but I’ll be damned if I know how you’d get to the technical solution without first achieving the legal momentum necessary to make it ubiquitous enough to actually be useful for that grand of a purpose. It’s the chicken/egg problem, or maybe more accurately the “stuffing-everything—back-into-Pandora’s-box” problem. Humanity has already created sufficient original imagery without a blockchain (or whatever) technical provenance model to allow for an essentially infinite remixing of just that existing body of images we didn’t know we’d have a need for provenance for into an enormous corpus of slop we also don’t have provenance for. Yes it would be good if there already existed a blockchain containing a Markov chain back to every original work of natural intellect, but how do you build that while the models are already regurgitating and chewing the weights they’ve already learned? I mean I do think you’ve (also) noticed one of the wicked hard problems, it’s just I’ve had similar conversations in the photography and cinematography and VFX worlds going back more than 20 years, long before generative AI was a thing, but now they are a thing I think we’re stuck in a world where we need to understand that image + attestation != truth, and never really did. But if you do figure it out, and somehow there exists a future in which we somehow never let Schrödinger’s stinking cat out of Schrödinger’s stinking bag, I’ll be the first to invest.

sryanpdx 1y ago
You're right that reaching full usefulness requires ubiquity, but achieving it requires solving adoption challenges that may be insurmountable. Billions of unauthenticated images already exist, but establishing truth going forward—even if only in certain areas—still has immense value. Your point that an authenticated image can still be a forgery through staging is correct. However, that's been true for much longer than our current crisis and the results have been far more manageable. Hardware attestation doesn't solve truth, but it's a necessary starting point. The honest answer: This solves a real problem, but implementation barriers may be insurmountable. I actually first imagined this framework over a year and a half ago and tried shopping it around, hoping a utility patent would motivate implementation. No one was interested in solving a problem with such a big question mark around reaching the end game. I'm publishing as prior art because if legal/regulatory momentum does emerge, I don't want authentication monopolized. But you're right to be skeptical. The fact you've had these conversations for 20+ years highlights the enormity of the problem. That said, we also haven't had blockchain for that long, and it's remarkably well suited to this application (way more than currency, in my opinion). If I figure out how to stuff everything back in Pandora's box, I'll let you know where to send the check.

sryanpdx 1y ago

You're right that reaching full usefulness requires ubiquity, but achieving it requires solving adoption challenges that may be insurmountable. Billions of unauthenticated images already exist, but establishing truth going forward—even if only in certain areas—still has immense value. Your point that an authenticated image can still be a forgery through staging is correct. However, that's been true for much longer than our current crisis and the results have been far more manageable. Hardware attestation doesn't solve truth, but it's a necessary starting point. The honest answer: This solves a real problem, but implementation barriers may be insurmountable. I actually first imagined this framework over a year and a half ago and tried shopping it around, hoping a utility patent would motivate implementation. No one was interested in solving a problem with such a big question mark around reaching the end game. I'm publishing as prior art because if legal/regulatory momentum does emerge, I don't want authentication monopolized. But you're right to be skeptical. The fact you've had these conversations for 20+ years highlights the enormity of the problem. That said, we also haven't had blockchain for that long, and it's remarkably well suited to this application (way more than currency, in my opinion). If I figure out how to stuff everything back in Pandora's box, I'll let you know where to send the check.