ChatGPT to sign its work

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Happy Wednesday, folks.

If you are sad and alone this Valentine’s Day, just imagine how much worse it could be.

You could be SBF or a 49ers fan. Or a PayPal investor. 🥰 

Can’t tell if ChatGPT wrote this or…

According to the internet, sometimes AI-generated media tricks people. Welcome to 2024.

To counter and restore some accountability, the idea of “watermarking” AI-generated content has gained in popularity.

Politicians have been pressuring tech companies to introduce these verification features, eventually leading to the fairly new Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity. The Adobe-organized group is working to standardize practices for images across models.

This would involve automatically adding some sort of digital signature to works created by DALL-E or Midjourney, potentially offering a way to handle the influx of AI-generated content across the internet.

A few big announcements were made this week:

OpenAI announced that DALL-E 3 will be adding watermarks to image metadata, aligning with the C2PA standards set forth by the Coalition. There are also several sites being built to identify the specific tool used to create the image.

Though a nice start, there are several significant shortcomings, including the watermarks only being applied to static images for now, and workarounds aren’t exactly rocket science - watermarks aren’t carried over on screenshots.

Meta is also cracking down on AI-generated content, using image metadata to label content through partnerships with several of the AI companies. Combined with stricter restrictions on political ads (and even ending the practice of “suggesting” political content), it seems that Zuck is at least pretending to learn from his mistakes in 2016 and 2020.

Even the White House is getting in on the action, announcing that it’s developing a cryptographic verification signature to attach to all executive correspondence in response to a surge in Biden deepfakes. But I’m sure that your far-right neighbors already fact check every article before posting political comments anyways.

You’re prolly tired of me saying it, but managing this system of credentials might be one of the best use cases for blockchain since proving I own a green zebra JPEG and belong to a “strong community” of frens that haven’t sent a message in our Discord since 2021.

Watermarking could identify images as AI-generated, and when paired with on-chain verification would allow for the origin of to be traced, potentially even back to the data that was used to train the model.

No startup has figured this out, and given the massive costs associated with models, it’s not likely a new one will be founded with this idea at its core.

However, given the lawsuits around content ownership and IP, it’s highly likely that there will be at least one unicorn that uses blockchain to train the model, potentially even rewarding the original content creators.

So as for opportunities, I see one in helping legacy companies to retroactively encrypt data and attach digital signatures at the ownership level to license to models.

While a few companies are trying to build tools to trace origins, there is certainly no clear frontrunner in the data aggregation and interpretation space helping people to understand the metadata attached to a particular image like a CoinMarketCap for AI-generated content.

One of the more interesting stories to follow in this area will be the standards set up by the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, and whether they will be able to bring enough of the big names into the fold that we have a uniform expectation for the data carried with images.

Whether this level of coordination is ever achieved remains to be seen

My fingers are crossed that at the very least, this means one fewer Biden voice recording asking me to send $10K in Bitcoin to a random wallet.

As AI-generated media increasingly deceives people, watermarking has emerged as a method to ensure accountability, with tech giants and political entities pushing for standardized practices to verify the origins of digital content.

Cheers to another day,

Trey