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Comment by georgeecollins | Hacker News Reader

Entrepreneurs of hacker news: Media companies are experimenting with tools that try to detect if a work contains AI. I don't have the domain knowledge to know if that will work, but it seems like the alternative is to have a system to track the provenance of a piece of art or a written work. If you could say that every change was done by party/ person xy then a company buying or licensing it could comfortably depend xy's assurance that it was original work.

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This is fundamentally impossible without multiple third parties personally witnessing the act of creation. Consider John Milton was blind and composed Paradise Lost by dictating it to another person. Even if you can prove a human, even a specific human, physically performed the act of typing or writing, that doesn't prove they came up with the words themselves. LLMs can whisper in your ear.

Though I don't personally believe this, consider the most widely-read book in the history of western civilization still has contested authorship, with many if not most readers convinced God himself dictated the words to the humans who wrote it down. We have no way to prove or disprove that.

The problem with this idea is that it operates on the assumption that consumers will actually care about "provenance" on art.

I just don't really buy that the set of people who care about that will be big enough for artists to care about signing up for some kind of provenance-tracking regime. Obviously there will be some people in that category on both sides, but I think it'll be niche. I have a hard time imagining Taylor Swift or Drake or whoever is going to start blockchaining their songwriting so that no one can say they used AI. It won't be a big enough segment of their market to care.

(and in fact, the first time Taylor Swift does some big AI-generated video or whatever, all of a sudden a whole bunch of people will suddenly decide they're cool with it)

There seems to be a huge backlash to existing works where AI was detected already at least in my art (creative writing). So I think we already have evidence consumers care. I don't think blockchaining is the solution for the general public, but I'd probably do exactly that if I was taking a university course these days since they tend to be hyper sensitive about AI and err on the side of the accuser so I want strong evidence my writing is mine. Which of course is ridiculously insufferable because I used to do a good portion of my homework in paper notebooks on the subway without stable internet.

Generative AI could synthesize a plausible commit history, too.

Constructing validation claims for useless properties, doesn't render the object with the property valuable?

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