The ability to generate creative content without the need to know how to make it is an amazing gift from the gods of technology for the broad public. For those who are inspired and driven to craft things with their own imagination and hands, the rise of AI is a catastrophe.

As the world becomes awash with cheap and easy AI-generated knockoffs, many forms of art and expression a put on a collision course with commoditization. And while there remain noticeable quality gaps between what talented humans and the latest AI large language models produce today, the quality of AI output will very soon reach the point where it’s indistinguishable from human-crafted.

There’s a scene in the second episode of the HBO series Westworld, where the character William asks Angela, the concierge at the AI theme park, whether she is human or not.

William: "Are you real?"

Angela: "If you can't tell, does it matter?"

This question from 2016 sci-fi has even greater resonance and scope today. If you are entertained by a novel, does it matter to you if the story came from:

• The mind of an author who imagined a story and considered the selection and placement of every word, phrase, sentence, description, and line of dialog to express their vision.  

• A large language model AI that examined thousands of stories in its training data and selected each character of text based on the probability that will result in a string of words, sentences, and pages that resemble what people consider to be a good story.

Why It Matters

Affordable, high-quality, machine-woven rugs with beautiful, intricate designs and flawless construction have been available for a long time. Yet people still pay thousands of dollars for hand-knotted Persian and Oriental rugs—even preowned ones—with all of their imperfections. Why?

There’s a deep human instinct to create things and an innate sense of value we put on things people create. Human-made things are vessels that contain the imagination, craft, and effort someone put into making them. Whether it’s a rug or a film or song or an oil painting or a GIF, there will always be people who appreciate and value things imagined by human minds and crafted by human hands.

Fighting Fugazis

So, in a world where AI-generated becomes indistinguishable from artisan-crafted, how can we tell the difference?

This is not a new problem. There’s a long history of counterfeits, fakes, forgeries, knockoffs, derivatives, reproductions, and unauthorized copies of original creative works. We’ve developed an assortment of systems and methods for countering and mitigating them over the centuries—albeit imperfect ones.

When the gods of technology close one door, they also open a wormhole to another dimension. There are a number of emerging technologies that together may hold the key to saving human creativity.

• Digital watermarking: Various methods exist for embedding markers into digital files that establish their authenticity or creator. In the case of AI-generated content, digital watermark information could be automatically embedded by default as it’s created. Some propose that this becomes a requirement in AI regulations. Creators can proactively watermark their works to combat copying and label it as something LLMs should exclude from their training data.

• Proof-of-personhood: When bots can convincingly impersonate humans, how can you prove that you are not an AI? Several approaches are in the works that aim to address this by providing means verifying that we each are, in fact, each a unique human person. Some approaches, like Worldcoin, capture scans of an individual’s biometric markers to prove unique humanness. Others, such as BrightID and Proof of Humanity take a social-graph approach. Individuals participate in some activity whereby other pre-vetted humans vouch for the newbies’ homo sapiens bona fides to earn them a verified digital ID (DID). Vitalik Buterin provides his insights into the pros and cons and risks of each approach in an informative blog post.

• Cryptographic provenance: NFTs are for far more than monkey jpegs. Unique nonfungible tokens can be used to provide immutable, tamper-resistant authentication of original works recorded on a public blockchain. Think of this as a global decentralized property title system for all types of creative work. When you buy a book from an author or a song from a band, you will also get an NFT that proves it’s authentic and that you own it. If you give it to someone else or sell it, the NFT goes with it. This preserves the ownership record from the creator through the entire chain of owners. The only way to demonstrate you have the genuine article is to also hold its NFT.

The Three-Body Solution

The three techs can work in concert to offer human creators a kind of digital, on-chain makers mark for permanently branding creative works as made by a particular human person. (Plus, the creator could remain anonymous or pseudonymous.) It works like this:

1. An author publishes a novel that includes digital watermarking.

2. The watermark integrates the author’s proof-of-personhood DID as a signature.

3. Each copy of the book is paired with an NFT minted by the publisher that includes metadata about the book and the author’s DID.

There are still many technical hurdles and open questions to address to get to this kind of solution. And the main question remains: In the end, for most people, does it matter?

I believe it does. Preserving ways for people to be recognized and valued for the things they create matters very much. Fortunately, there are also many of us who will always appreciate the many things that originate from human inspiration and not machine generation.

A world filled with art made without inspiration will be uninspiring indeed.

In 2014, Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood coined the phrase Web 3.0 to refer to the idea of a trustless, decentralized internet enabled by blockchains and cryptography. This model presents a contrast to how centralized the existing internet has become—with a small number of powerful companies and entities dominating and monopolizing it.

In the years since, the term has been streamlined into the sleeker web3 format and gained additional meanings, features, and grandiosity along the way. The concept is compelling, but builders have a lot more work to do before we can make any realistic claims that a new era of the internet is upon us.

Declaring an Epoch

Fifteen years earlier, in 1999, Darcy Dinucci coined the term Web 2.0 to describe how the World Wide Web was evolving from only offering static pages that users view passively into websites that offer more participation and interaction. The term remained in obscurity for the next five years until Tim O'Reilly and Dale Dougherty put it into the tech mainstream with the first Web 2.0 Conference in 2004. Startups, VCs, tech journalists, academics, and marketing departments have been refining the meaning of Web 2.0 ever since.

Eyes of the Beholders

Both the Web 2.0 and web3 labels suffer (and, in some cases, benefit) from their squishy and ambiguous definitions. They are malleable enough to take on whatever grand or derisive meaning a person using the term wants. These statements, for instance, are both simultaneously inaccurate and true:

• Web 2.0 is the culmination of breakthrough technologies that offer us all the productive and wonderous connected experiences of our modern age.

• Web 2.0 is all the old, centralized models of the internet that extract value from and exert control over users.

Original Sin: Version Control 

Way back in the 20th century, Dinucci presciently observed what would prove to be a massive paradigm shift for the internet. However, by borrowing the version numbering convention from software releases, the term Web 2.0 connoted that an entirely new, upgraded version of the web was out. Even by the time of the first Web 2.0 conference, the idea was a lofty promise rather than a new reality. It would take many years and a massive number of technical advances for the participatory internet to come to fruition. Among a myriad of other innovations, Web 2.0 would still require advances in:

• Network and Communications Infrastructure: broadband fiberoptic networks, cellular data networks, wireless, data center, cloud, GPS

• Hardware: improved processor technology, batteries, screens, storage, laptops, devices, cameras

• Software & Standards: HTML/XML, DNS, CSS, JavaScript, AJAX, APIs, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, SMS, RSS

• Models: UX, peer-to-peer, blogging, streaming, app stores, e-commerce, SEO, location-based services, podcasting, social networks, user-generated content, SAAS

Repeating History

Now it seems, web3 is following a similar path. Those of us down the crypto rabbit hole can see how blockchain technologies can, and likely will, transform so many aspects of our connected lives. But we're a long way from a new decentralized age.

Unfortunately, Gavin Wood’s term for a decentralized internet was pressed into service early. The industry needed a term to stand in tarnished term “crypto” and the negative baggage it brings with it. Plus, the broadness and ambiguity of web3 work well as a catch-all for all things blockchain-related. But like its predecessor, web3 will require many more advances to become a reality.

AI Has Entered the Chat

Meanwhile, as builders trudge through crypto winter, an 800-pound gorilla has been lifting weights and expanding its training data.

Web3 natives: "Blockchain tech will transform the internet and society. You'll see!"
AI: “Hold my beer.”

If history is any guide, there won’t be a single branch of technology or one revolutionary innovation that will define the next epoch of the internet. It will be the culmination of breakthroughs and the combination of models that will give the next phase its shape.

If the term web3 remains in use, its meaning will have to expand to include AI-powered game-changers and other breakthroughs yet to come. Years from now (likely not very many), we'll look back and see how crypto, blockchains, NFTs, large language models, chatbots, generative creative tools, metaverse, IoT, augmented and virtual reality, decentralized identity, and many other large and small advances all came together to bring us into a Third Internet Age.

Of course, it didn’t take long for indoor toilets to become so accepted and ubiquitous that it’s a given in most of the world. But there was a time when the idea of doing your business inside the home was ludicrous and FUD-worthy.

Crypto and web3 have many skeptics, critics, and attackers who, at best, view it as silly and at worst, as “disgusting and contrary to the interest of civilization.”

From flush toilets to automobiles to the internet, we’ve seen this cycle play out again and again. A new innovation is created. A small number of people see its potential. Most don’t understand it. Many reflexively distrust it. Over time, however, truly disruptive technologies always become inevitable.

Rodgers defines the qualities of these adopter categories in his Diffusion of Innovation

Catching Waves

First, theorized in the 1950s by Everett Rodgers, adoption lifecycles for new disruptive innovations tend to follow a predictable bell curve.

theory:

• Innovators: Willing to experiment and take risks on technologies that may fail; high social status and financial liquidity; close to scientific sources and other innovators.

• Early Adopters: More discerning in tech choices than innovators; influential with other adopter categories; higher social status, education, and financial liquidity than later adopters.

• Early Majority: Above average social and financial status; adopt new innovations after watching early adopters work out the kinks.

• Late Majority: Highly skeptical; only adopt new technology after most everyone else has; lower financial and social status; risk averse.

• Laggards: Traditional and averse to change; older; last to adopt if they ever do.

Not every innovation captures the momentum and proves its use cases well enough to ride the wave through to mainstream adoption. History is replete with examples of breakthroughs that couldn’t break through to rise beyond the realm of innovators and some early adopters (Segway PT, 3DTVs). Others were overtaken on the upslope by superior innovations (e.g. iPhone making Blackberry obsolete). And some were maybe just before their time (Apple Newton, Google Glass, jetpacks).

We’re So Early

Just because the phrase has reached the cliche stage in its adoption curve doesn’t mean it’s not true. web3 is very, very early.

DeFi and NFTs are the two current marquee use cases of web3. While the number of DeFi users is on a strong growth trajectory, at fewer than 5 million today, the DeFi user base is less than .06% of the global population.

The growth of NFT trading on the leading marketplace OpenSea has been even more parabolic. Still, at around 2 million purchasing users, only .025% of humans on Earth have exchanged cryptocurrency for an NFT on OpenSea. We’re clearly still on the far left side of the Rodgers curve.

As for other web3 use cases, there are likely even fewer people participating in DAOs than in DeFi. Plus, I’d argue that trading crypto on centralized platforms isn’t exactly a web3 activity. So yes, we are indeed early—which also means that there’s still unlimited headroom for growth!

Rhymes with Internet

As the saying goes, history doesn’t repeat, it rhymes. In the mid-1990s, I attended a conference on The World Wide Web. The presenters spoke in hyperbolic terms about how the Information Superhighway was going to revolutionize everything. Yet, at the time, all they could demonstrate was how to build a basic “Hello World!” Web page with HTML that anyone in the world could view! Provided, of course, they had:

• The IP address of your page. Domain registration was cumbersome and search was lousy until Google arrived years later.

• A PC. Pre-internet, a lot fewer people owned PCs as the main use cases for a home computer were word processing, “desktop publishing,” and playing rudimentary games.

• A modem. Likely a laboriously slow 14.4 baud dial-up modem connected to a landline phone connection.

• Internet access. ISPs were a new business and AOL had not yet started carpet-bombing mailboxes with signup discs.

• Knowledge of how to use all of the above.

In 1994, the internet had what we’d now call serious UX and product-market fit issues. It had opened up a wide-open frontier of possibilities, but we’d only started to imagine what possibilities could be out there. I left that conference with two thick manuals and the sense that the internet might be an interesting hobby. Like ham radio without as much equipment. At the time, I didn’t have the vision to imagine what it could become.

It would take another 25 years, billions of dollars, multiple market cycles, and the collective genius of countless visionaries to get to the point where we can stream 4k movies on a pocket-sized computer while waiting at the DMV.

Today, we don’t think of the amazing things we do with our connected devices as doing internet things. It’s just how we live. The same will happen with blockchain-powered innovations. Web3 has opened another frontier of possibilities, and we’ve only begun to explore it. Sooner than the Early and Late Majority realize what’s happened, they’ll be tapping into cryptocurrency, NFTs, and other blockchain innovations to do incredible new things. They won’t call it crypto or web3, it will just be how we live. But for now, we are early. Enjoy it.