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Blockchain and generative AI: a perfect match?
Consider this example for a hypothetical outsourcing provider. This company has decades of contracts, statements of work, white papers, blog posts, and PowerPoint presentations that it has used to market and engage with customers and prospects. He wants to point ChatGPT to that content and then use the chatbot for a variety of purposes, such as generating quick responses to requests for proposals or summarizing the company’s thinking on various topics when its executives are asked to give presentations at conferences. The company wants to know that once the chatbot has access to this proprietary data, it will not allow that data to be used unfairly by the company’s competitors. Or, where reuse is acceptable, the company may want to ensure that it is credited, or even compensated, for that reuse. He also wants to make sure he doesn’t reveal trade secrets or violate any confidentiality agreements he may have signed with customers.
If all these pieces of IP were turned into NFTs with smart contracts embedded and stored on a blockchain, the company could tag each of them with codes that tell ChatGPT which bits could be used freely, which could only be used with attribution, which could only be used with permission , and this only upon payment of royalties or other forms of compensation. ChatGPT would only need simple changes to recognize these codes.
Alternatively, imagine that this same company decides to use a generative AI chatbot to create a proposal for a customer, only to discover that a key component of the proposal largely mirrors concepts developed and perhaps copyrighted by one of its competitors , potentially inviting a lawsuit. If we were in a world where most organizations stored and tagged their IP on a blockchain before making it available to generative AI chatbots, the potential for infringing on someone else’s intellectual property would dramatically decrease.
Companies are grappling with these concerns right now. They want to be first movers and they want to create new value for their customers and consumers. At the same time, they don’t want to create risks that they may not be able to manage. Some have already ended up in court. Earlier this year, for example, stock photography company Getty Images sued Stability AI, maker of the AI-based image generator Stable Diffusion, over alleged copyright violations. Getty claimed in a press statement that Stability AI had “illegally copied and processed millions of copyrighted images” to train its software for its own commercial benefit.1 Getty is seeking up to $1.8 trillion in damages.2
How claims of copyright infringement or intellectual property misappropriation might play out in court is largely unknown at this point, given how new the field of generative artificial intelligence is. It will almost certainly take years for courts to catch up with the technology.
Companies want to be first movers and want to create new value for their customers and clients. At the same time, they don’t want to create risks that they may not be able to manage.