I believe we should use a 5-digit annual budget to create/serve trust-less, cryptographic timestamps of all public content, in order to significantly counteract the growing threat that AI-generated fake content poses to truth-seeking and trust. We should also encourage and help all organizations to do likewise with private content.

As the rate and quality of AI-generated content keeps increasing, it seems inevitable that it will become easier to create fake content and harder to verify/refute it. Remember the very recent past when faking a photo was so hard that simply providing a photo was considered proof? If we do nothing about it, these AI advances might have a devastating impact on people’s opportunities to trust both each other and historic material, and might end up having negative value for humanity on net.

I believe that trust-less time-stamping is an effective, urgent, tractable and cheap method to partly, but significantly so, counteract this lamentable development. Here’s why:

EFFECTIVE

It is likely that fake creation technology will outpace fake detection technology. If so, we will nominally end up in an indefinite state of having to doubt pretty much all content. However, with trust-less time-stamping, the contest instead becomes between the fake creation technology available at the time of timestamping, and the fake detection technology available at the time of truth-seeking.

Time-stamping everything today will protect all past and current content against suspicion of interference by all futur