Proof of Humanity for Creators

You have probably seen the quality of images, texts, screenplays, poems, videos and short films coming from artificial intelligence (AI). Videos from AI like Midjourney are already being used by some indie filmmakers for scenes they cannot really afford to shoot with a camera and real backdrops. Although news media may excitedly report on these new creative capabilities, these news media organizations and reporters themselves are slowly being replaced either by independent influencers or journalists who have their own YouTube or Twitter feeds.
Although many AI tools right now still have some type of giveaway flaw that allows people to distinguish between AI and human-created work, there are now some tools that have the right lighting, shading and other characteristics that make discerning between human and AI difficult. Check out this YouTube video by famous influencer Marques Brownlee that asks you to distinguish between human and AI-generated videos from Sora.
Personally, I do use AI to assist me in my normal tasks as an assistive tool. But I am still the one conceptualizing the work and doing most of it. It does help me in initial research, for example, but I still need to search for real references.
Nothing wrong with using AI to assist you in your work. But just like any other work done with tools or other people, there is a point where you need to stop saying it is your work because you did not really do most of it. Where that point is, though, is debatable and perhaps the subject of another article.
In the computer science world, this means that many AI have already passed the Turing test. The Turing test basically measures if a human can distinguish if the entity he/she is communicating with is a human or computer, and is named after Alan Turing. Turing was featured a few years ago in the famous film The Imitation Game.
Needless to say, these new AI creative capabilities are upsetting many human creators. Their paying clients are sometimes tempted to use these new tools to replace them to save on costs.
Many people probably sense that at some point, there may be a societal pushback against AI, especially since many jobs are being replaced, not just in the creative field. At some point, that pushback might become really huge.
The Rolling Stone Culture Council is an invitation-only community for Influencers, Innovators and Creatives. Do I qualify?
The problem is, how do you distinguish between art made by humans and AI?
The answer is proof of humanity tools. These are ways of putting some type of cryptographically signed digital artwork (or music, video, etc.) much like how watermarks work, but these cryptographically signed signatures register the artwork as “human authentic” on the blockchain.
Sam Altman (of ChatGPT fame) has a crypto company called Worldcoin, which gives people who register their eye (iris) patterns using scanning orbs a crypto token. Personally, I find this obtrusive and frankly strange. They have their own reasons for using this technique, as it cannot be easily faked, but hopefully, there are better, less intrusive ways to come in the future.
There are also other tools that involve cryptography and something called zero-knowledge proofs that are beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that a lot of research is going into this area, which will play a more important role as more people want to ensure that human artists really made the creative work they are getting (or buying).
Proof of humanity tools will probably see more use in the next few years as a way for creators to show their audiences that their work is human-created.
Unless human creators get their hands on these tools, they may find themselves swamped with AI-generated creative work that ordinary audiences just gobble up without much thought.
Note: I am still a student of AI, as many of us are. At the time of writing, I do not have any investments in this space except perhaps indirectly in the tech giants within mutual funds and ETFs.