Leveraging Cryptocurrency and Blockchain to Address AI Governance Challenges
Summary:
This article explores the challenges of governing advanced AI technologies, focusing particularly on authenticating content, affirming identities, and incorporating AI technology within financial structures. It suggests that answers to these issues might be found within the realms of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. The piece discusses the potential of blockchain technology to guarantee photo authenticity and the role of cryptocurrency in identity validation and financial transactions involving AI agents. The author, Dean W. Ball, emphasizes these solutions' potential in forging an improved digital ecosystem ready for the Fourth Industrial Revolution driven by AI.
Policymakers are grappling with the implications of advanced AI technologies, faced with challenges like verifying the genuineness of content, affirming individual credentials, and integrating AI tech within fiscal structures. Such issues, requiring both legislative and technological interventions, could potentially find answers within the realms of cryptocurrency and blockchain. Such solutions, if adopted, could aid lawmakers to steer AI utilization towards beneficial ends.
With AI-generated deepfakes posing serious concerns for legislators, primarily for their potential in political manipulation, there is an urgent need for authenticity verification. Noteworthy is an instance in January where an AI-created recording of President Biden was employed for voter deterrence at the New Hampshire primary polls.
Deepfake technology has multiple exploitative avenues. For instance, the White House Press Secretary suggested recently that embarrassing footage of President was deepfaked, despite the content being genuine, although misleadingly cropped. Hence, such technology can be utilized to forge politicians and to discredit authentic, albeit inconvenient, content.
The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) is working on a technical norm to address this issue, but it has been found to be susceptible, as authenticity metadata can be often manipulated during the photo-editing process. An alternative solution may lie within blockchain technology with its unalterable ledgers. This could be adopted by camera manufacturers to guarantee each photo is authenticated as genuine at pixel level, with any modifications easily identified.
Large language models, like ChatGPT, have capabilities to simulate one's writing style and impersonate individuals. Although it might not be convincing to someone close, it could deceive a coworker or a customer service representative. Online identity verification has been problematic even before the advent of AI language models. Policymakers have sought age verification requirement for social media platforms whilst trying to prevent cybercrimes like identity theft.
Cryptocurrency infrastructure might have potential solution with digital identity infrastructure based on biometric authentication and zero-knowledge proofs—trusted mathematical tool in crypto industry—for identity validation. Information necessary for transaction could be only selectively shared, safeguarding individual's personal data.
Lastly, AI agents are quickly growing with ability to execute complex functions on behalf of humans. However, their access to traditional banking system remains questionable. Here, cryptocurrencies, particularly stablecoins, can play a significant role. Since this form of currency maintains parity with USD, it would familiarize human users with digital transactions.
The aforementioned possibilities, although speculative, underscore internet governance challenges — much like fake news and identity theft — crypto, as a developed technology, still faces struggles integrating into traditional banking system that wasn't designed keeping in mind digital or internet. By exploring these options, we could prepare for a digital ecosystem equipped for the AI-driven Fourth Industrial Revolution.
About the author: Dean W. Ball is a research fellow at George Mason University's Mercatus Center. His past roles include senior program manager for the Hoover Institution's State and Local Governance Initiative and executive director of Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation. He currently serves on the board of directors of the Alexander Hamilton Institute and on the advisory council of the Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue University.
Published At
6/25/2024 6:27:05 PM
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