AI Vegan – A real use case for NFT/Blockchain?
As part of my teaching in AI, I have to think a lot about where AI itself is going.
I have an agnostic view of technology
Much of the media gets too carried away with both successes and failures.
One such technology is blockchain
Blockchain has a checkered history
I am not optimistic about blockchain because, in my view, it is a technology that is looking for a use case that can be uniquely addressed by it.
Crypto was one such use case… but crypto itself has its own problems.
NFT was the second.
NFT (Non-fungible token) is intended to represent a piece of digital content unique as part of the Ethereum blockchain, which keeps track of ownership and trading.
In theory, an NFT can be attached to any digital content that supposedly has some value (even a tweet).
This use of NFT (hence blockchain) has also been influenced by hype (Bored monkey, Nyan cat, and of course Metaverse NFT property).
It is in this context that I believe that it is an area that could be interesting for blockchain.
Firstly, an observation that in the digital world aggregation models have taken off a lot.
For example, streaming music is behind the boom in song-back catalog deals.
We can actually see something analogous in the major language models.
If you are not familiar with large language models, you should read this from Stanford: how large language models will transform the scientific community and AI.
Large language models essentially scrape the web for training.
But how ethical is this for the creators?
As such, each image in the training set contributes only a small amount of information—a few tweaks to some numerical weights scattered throughout the network.
But … the people who created these images did not give their consent. And the model can be seen as a direct threat to their livelihood. No one expected creative AIs to come for the artist jobs first, but here we are!
leading to a very interesting tweet comparing AI to veganism in the sense that people make their own personal ethical decisions.
This may well work – it’s not talking about a lot of money for one piece of content (like bored ape) – but rather like the song back catalog models.
And companies that train large language models can afford to pay – every time they train (and indeed retrain!) a model – they have to pay the original creators of the content used to train the model.
Image source
