Midjourney released its first version only one and a half years ago and went from generating cringe, overlaid mutants to photo-realistic pictures that you can't distinguish from reality.

It creates a significant threat for artists, photographers, designers, writers and other creative individuals in producing content.

Too much AI on our lives

It's really hard to predict trends, but in the case of AI, some of them are quite obvious:

1. We'll be overloaded with AI content.

2. We'll see waves of fake content.

3. We'll need tools that help us distinguish 'real' from 'fake.'

We've seen a lot of articles about AI and NFTs, but in most of them, the main narrative is that AI will allow the creation of cool generated NFTs. Hmm, probably, but that's not the main thing. I prefer the idea that NFTs can protect artists against some aspects of AI.

AI as an artist's friend

Let's consider the most popular use case in the NFT industry – digital art. Humans want to have an emotional connection with human-created content. We feel that pure AI-generated content lacks the soul and personal touch of human-created work. We want to have connections between us and the artists. And yes, many artists use and will start to use AI in their content, artwork, writings, etc. But because we know that a human artist used these instruments, we can still have this connection with the art. We still see the human guidance and vision that we want to connect with.

Artists invest personal emotions and experiences into their work, even when using AI. They might use AI to express personal feelings and tell meaningful stories. A good example of this is Refik Anadol’s 'Machine Hallucination,' which uses machine learning algorithms to create art.

We understand that Refik used AI for this, but it doesn’t matter to us. We can still feel an emotional connection with his art because we can sense (or just pretend that we can) the artist's vision behind these instruments.

It’s an example of ‘good’ Ai that helps artists to create. Let’s see how AI can become a villain.

AI as an artist’s enemy

Greg Rutkowski is a digital artist who has faced challenges due to AI-generated replicas of his work. He creates illustrations using classical painting techniques. However, his name was used as a prompt.

Here are some quotes from one of the articles that describe his case:

“Greg Rutkowski said: "The first month that I discovered it, I realized that it will clearly affect my career and I won't be able to recognise and find my own works on the internet.

"The results will be associated with my name, but it won't be my image. It won't be created by me. So it will add confusion for people who are discovering my works."

"All that we've been working on for so many years has been taken from us so easily with AI," he added.”

As a result, Greg Rutkowski was removed from Stable Diffusion, but AI artists brought him back. I think we all understand that artists can't protect themselves from copying and prompting their art by AI models. You can beat one model, but there are many of them.

Right now, you can find AI-generated art prompted using Greg Rutkowski freely available on Civitai.

How can artists protect themself?

We all understand that any art can be prompted, and artists can't prevent that. And let's be honest, many people who bought illustrations from real artists have stopped doing so because the artist's name is not important to them. They just need a cool illustration for their website or a photo for their social media post.

However, there will still be a large cohort of people who value the personality of the author and buy certain art connected with its creator. It can be an artist, photographer, writer, designer, etc. In that case, artists can protect themselves (and their audience) from being scammed by verifying their artwork on the blockchain and creating a token that refers to their art

NFTs work as a digital certificate of ownership. They are stored on a blockchain, providing an unchangeable record of the artwork's creation and ownership history. This confirms that a certain person created or owns some NFTs. This transparency ensures the authenticity of the piece and the identity of its creator.

In an AI world where AI can generate convincing art, NFTs serve as a verification tool, distinguishing original human-created works from AI-generated ones. I can imagine that in the next 5-10 years, artists will start to register their art on the blockchain. And I see only benefits in that:

• You can now sell your art.

• You can verify that this is original art, minted by the original artist and not generated by AI

Virus and Antidote

Blockchain is about digital scarcity. AI is about digital surplus. And they can work in tandem. My favorite example that shows this trend is Sam Altman’s two companies: OpenAI and Worldcoin. Look at this screenshot from the Worldcoin website. Sam is literally selling viruses and antidotes with his two companies.

The problem of distinguishing humans from AI online will be really big because even with existing technologies, we can generate photos, videos and voices of real humans and use them to scam people. Worldcoin doesn't store personal data on-chain and uses blockchain for recording unique hashes (not the actual biometric data) to prevent double registrations and maintain the integrity of the system.

But, Worldcoin has some issues with privacy and security that Vitalik mentioned in his article about proof-of-personhood. I don't have much insight into their products, so let's just see how the Worldcoin approach works in the future and which consequences their product faces.

Concluding

I’m not against AI, because I understand its inevitability and recognize that it’s just a tool that many content creators will use. But we need an instrument that allows us to verify the ownership of digital assets.

NFTs still need time to mature. They still have many problems like onboarding non-crypto users, complex wallets, ponzi schemes and overfinancialization. And we definitely will see new hype cycles with many people trying to fulfill their greed. However, I see real value in them and think that they are inevitable because they add real value in the AI era.

How people's opinions have changed while I was working in crypto:

• In 2021 – "Wow, you work in crypto? Can you explain NFTs to me?"

• In 2022 – "Oh, you work in crypto? My buddy bought five 'donkey JPEGs' and lost all his money."

• In 2023 – "I’ve heard crypto is dead, isn't it?"

• December 2023 – "You work in crypto? Awesome! Should I buy this Solano thing?

That seems like a rollercoaster because the attention of wide communities changes tremendously based on crypto prices.

When crypto achieves product-market fit, people who were skeptical and criticized it start to take new products for granted. And the funny thing is, they may not even realize there's a blockchain running under the hood.

We can see it with stablecoins, which are used by many non-crypto people. Btw, many of these people don't even use a wallet. They just go to some offline P2P exchange, give cash to an employee and they send cheap TRC20 USDT to some wallet.

I think we can see the same with NFTs and crypto games. Olaf Carlson Wee was asked on one of the podcasts, 'What is obvious to him?' He said we'll see high-quality games with crypto-economic incentives that will grow faster than anything the world has ever seen. He said this before ChatGPT launched, so it would be hard to compete with that growth, but I believe we need just one game that changes everything. Then, communities that were skeptical about blockchain will simply play these games and have fun.

Builders shouldn’t be sensitive to what non-crypto people say. To be honest, skepticism is understandable. Blockchain products are not easy to use, we've seen a lot of scams, new UX patterns, and constant FOMO.

Today people trust in crypto, tomorrow they may not, but the day after tomorrow it will become a part of their lives.

A major sign we can observe is users do not realize and do not care which blockchain they use. And that can be the end goal for the entire industry.

Now, the web3 world is more blockchain-centric rather than app-centric. This is because most users of dApps are involved with the blockchains as investors, degens, or builders. But this will change.

Yes, the blockchain choice can (and should) matter for developers, because each app has its own needs. In the web2 world, if a developer wants to build analytics software, they choose Clickhouse, but for e-commerce platforms, it’s probably better to use Postgres or some other relational database.

But end users do not care.

That’s common in web2, but fortunately, we can already see these signs in web3 as well. I’ll mention three examples of that here.

Tron USDT

Stablecoins have reached product market fit for several categories of users, like people from countries with unstable economies and those involved in international money transfers. For example, many merchants worldwide buy wholesale goods in China and send USDT to their suppliers.

I had conversations with several merchants who use Tron USDT. Here's what I see:

• They don’t understand what blockchain is.

• They don’t understand what Tron is.

And that’s great. Merchants are using Tron USDT for three reasons:

• It’s easy to make international transfers.

• It’s cheap.

• Their suppliers also use it.

Nobody cares about decentralization, consensus algorithms or Justin Sun. They just want quick access to USD with cheap fees

Sorare

Sorare is an interesting project that is rarely talked about, built using Validium technology on Ethereum. One of the very few games that doesn't focus on web3 users but rather onboards real sports fans obsessed with card collecting.

The community that plays Sorare doesn’t realize they are using an L2 solution. They are focused on trading their cards and making money from that activity. And, occasionally, it just happened, perhaps not intentionally, but blockchain is the main technology that enables this.

Worldcoin

I'm not saying that it has reached product-market fit yet, but on their website, the Worldcoin team mentions that they have onboarded more than 2.5 million users worldwide. The company has a strong focus on the LatAm region and other countries with unstable economies, and probably the users don't care which L2 framework Worldcoin has chosen, or why optimistic rollups are better than ZK rollups (they're just cheaper).

Soon, we'll see more examples of this trend. Wikipedia (yep, that’s my source) says that the first dApps on Ethereum were built in 2016. I guess that 99% of the people who used them were aware that they were interacting with the Ethereum blockchain.

Let's see if by 2030, we have 99% of people not realizing which blockchain they are using.