I’m finding it harder and harder to tell whether an image has been generated or not (the main giveaways are disappearing). This is probably going to become a big problem in like half a year’s time. Does anyone know of any proof of legitimacy projects that are gaining traction? I can imagine news orgs being the first to be hit by this problem. Are they working on anything?
I actually spent a few years of my life writing a whole software project for exactly this purpose, and I still think that it’s the only practical way to solve this problem.
Called “Aletheia”, it ditches the idea that software can spot a fake entirely and instead provides a way to guarantee the author of a piece of media. If you trust the source, you can trust the image/video/document/whatever.
If you’re curious, here are a few relevant links:
I think this is key. There have always been sources that have been incredibly trustworthy that people choose to ignore. Like AP News or Reuters for example. Sometimes they might make mistakes but as long as they keep fixing them in a timely manner that’s what’s important.
Yeah it’s still possible they could post an AI image - but that’s why you compare sources.
Besides that would ruin the credibility they’ve spent decades building.
Read the beginning of the white paper two - great work! I can tell you put care into this.
Is this similar to how the NFT was supposed to work?
Thanks! And no, this is absolutely nothing like NFTs.
NFTs require the existence of a blockchain and are basically a way of encoding a record of “ownership” on that chain:
If the image at that URL changes (this is called a rug pull) or a competing blockchain is developed, then the NFT is meaningless. The biggest problem though is the wasted effort in maintaining that blockchain. It’s a crazy amount of resources wasted just to establish the origin.
Aletheia is much simpler: your private key is yours and lives on your computer, and your public key lives in DNS or on your website at a given URL. The images, videos, documents, etc. are all tagged with metadata that provides (a) the origin of the public key (that DNS record or your website) and a cryptographic proof that this file was signed by whomever owns the corresponding private key. This ties the file to the origin domain/site, effectively tying it to the reputation of the owners of that site.
The big benefit to this is that it can operate entirely offline once the public keys are fetched. So you could validate 1 million JPEG images in a few minutes, since once you fetch the public key, everything is happening locally.
Sounds much more similar to something like NOSTR. I’ve always like the simplicity of using a keypair as an identity.
Thanks for the explanation!