This article was contributed by Jean Michel Azzopardi.
AI has finally taken centre stage in the public eye and with good reason. Tools like ChatGPT, Heygen and Midjourney produce tangible value that anyone can almost instantly understand. This is in stark contrast to the NFT cycle of 2021 which was built on nothing but hype.
It is rare for technology to be a unique value proposition that stands on its own two feet in any customer facing product. There are only a handful of industries in which this applies, and the most affected target group are enthusiasts, such as TV or PC junkies boasting about how micro QLED TVs look way better than OLED or how Apple M2 CPUs are way ahead of Intel.
People don’t sell AI by merely touting about how good a specific algorithm for stable diffusion is or which LLM it happens to be using – they sell the result i.e. AI-generated text, images, and videos.
Technology is neither good nor bad. It is inherently agnostic to such labels; its alignment instead being determined by the person wielding it. Think of it like a firearm which can be used to commit a crime or prevent one.
AI is no different. It has already played its part as a dark harbinger for a dystopian future by swinging elections via Cambridge Analytica, AI scam calls mimicking familiar voices and fooling loved ones across the world, as well as deepfake videos creating some horrible scenarios.
Such measures will only become more advanced, and in little to no time, the world at large will have extreme difficulty in differentiating between content that is organically generated vs AI-generated.
To effectively create a safe digital environment, we NEED as humans to be able to know when we are consuming content made by AI vs by natural persons.
Blockchains are terribly inefficient bits of tech. As networked databases they achieve everything fantastically worse than their centralised counterparts with a few key exceptions.
“Blockchains are uniquely equipped to expertly notarise datasets owned by multiple parties”
A typical centralised SQL database can never do this well. Why you ask? Because someone must own it. Decentralised infrastructure is not owned by anyone, making it ideal since there can be no argument about “who owns what,” which is often the blocker for projects involving multiple companies/parties.
In short, the solution to this problem is to hash each piece of generated content and tie it to a creatorID hash. These hash graphs will live across multiple blockchains and will be interconnected. An interpreter on the user’s end will be able to cryptographically assert whether the content being consumed is man-made or otherwise.
Crypto is the fuel for any blockchain related application, which means that tokens for a particular network are the currency that will be used for verification. This will vastly increase the network usage of the right blockchains and therefore heavily increase the price of each token.
The “right blockchain” will be defined in many ways, most use cases will require extreme speed although others will need varying levels of security and accessibility, meaning there will be no single champion chain, rather a mix of each for each particular use case. TLDR: HODL the right bags
We are at the cusp of yet another bull run which seems to be fuelled by multiple ETF’s buying up BTC as well impending halving news. We are unfortunately still related to crypto as an investment rather than a utility but that will eventually change.
The future bull run will definitely be based on the rise and mitigation of AI growth. Whether RWA (Real World Assets) will come into their own before that and take the spotlight is anyone’s guess, but it will definitely happen at some point.
An EX IBM’er, student of Bitcoin since 2011 and pioneer in the blockchain agnostic realm, Jean Michel Azzopardi is a renowned blockchain evangelist and cybersecurity advocate who has made remarkable strides in advancing the adoption of blockchain technology while emphasising the critical importance of cybersecurity. With a profound understanding of decentralised systems and their vulnerabilities, Azzopardi focuses on promoting the transformative power of blockchain across industries, while advocating for robust cybersecurity measures to ensure data integrity and protection.
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