TL;DR
I believe we should use a 5-digit annual budget to create/serve trust-less, cryptographic timestamps of all public content, in order to significantly counteract the growing threat that AI-generated fake content poses to truth-seeking and trust. We should also encourage and help all organizations to do likewise with private content.
THE PROBLEM & SOLUTION
As the rate and quality of AI-generated content keeps increasing, it seems inevitable that it will become easier to create fake content and harder to verify/refute it. Remember the very recent past when faking a photo was so hard that simply providing a photo was considered proof? If we do nothing about it, these AI advances might have a devastating impact on people's opportunities to trust both each other and historic material, and might end up having negative value for humanity on net.
I believe that trust-less time-stamping is an effective, urgent, tractable and cheap method to partly, but significantly so, counteract this lamentable development. Here's why:
EFFECTIVE
It is likely that fake creation technology will outpace fake detection technology. If so, we will nominally end up in an indefinite state of having to doubt pretty much all content. However, with trust-less time-stamping, the contest instead becomes between the fake creation technology available at the time of timestamping, and the fake detection technology available at the time of truth-seeking.
Time-stamping everything today will protect all past and current content against suspicion of interference by all future fake creation technology. As both fake creation and fake detection technology progress, no matter at what relative pace, the value of timestamps will grow over time. Perhaps in a not so distant future, it will become an indispensable historical record.
URGENT
Need I say much about the pace of progress for AI technology, or the extent of existing content? The value of timestamping everything today rather than in one month, is some function of the value of the truth of all historical records and other content, and technological development during that time. I suspect there's a multiplication somewhere in that function.
TRACTABLE
We already have the cryptographic technology and infrastructure to make trust-less timestamps. We also have large public archives of digital and/or digitized content, including but not limited to the web. Time-stamping all of it might not be trivial, but it's not particularly hard. It can even be done without convincing very many people that it needs to be done. For non-public content, adding timestamping as a feature in backup software should be similarly tractable - here the main struggle will probably be to convince users of the value of timestamping.
Implementation: Each piece of content is hashed, the hashes put into a merkle tree, and the root of that tree published on several popular, secure, trust-less public ledgers. Proof of timestamp is produced as a list of hashes along the merkle branch from the content up to the root, together with transaction IDs. This technology, including implementations, services and public ledgers already exists. For private content, you might want to be able to prove a timestamp for one piece of content without divulging the existence of another piece of content. To do so, one would add one bottom level in the merkle tree where each content hash is hashed with a pseudo-random value rather than another content hash. This pseudo-random value can be produced from the content hash itself and a salt that is constant within an organization.
CHEAP
Timestamping n pieces of content comprising a total of b bytes will incur a one-time cost for processing on the order of O(b+n), a continuous cost for storage on the order of O(n), and a one-time cost for transactions on public, immutable ledgers on the order of O(1). Perhaps most significant is the storage. Using a hash function with h bytes of output, it's actually possible to store it all in nh bytes. When in active use, you want to be able to produce proofs without excessive processing. In this usage mode, it would be beneficial to have 2nh bytes available.
Taking archive.org as an example, reasonable values are h=32 and n=7.8*10^11 [1], requiring 2nh ≈ 5.0*10^13 ≈ 50 TB of storage (not TiB, since we're talking pricing). At current HDD prices in the 7.50-14.50 USD/TB range [2,3], that is a few hundred bucks. Add storage redundancy, labor, continuously adding timestamps and serving proofs etc., and we're still talking about a 5-digit amount yearly.
SUMMARY
I have here presented an idea that I believe has a pretty good chance of significantly counteracting some negative consequences of emerging AI technology, using only a 5-digit yearly budget. Beyond effective, tractable and cheap, I have also argued for why I believe it is urgent, in the sense that vast amounts of future public good is lost for every month this is not done. I am not in a position to do this myself, and failed to raise awareness at HN [4], which arguable wasn't the right forum. It seems to be an opportunity too good to pass on. Here's hoping to find someone who cares enough to get it done, or explain why I'm wrong.
To what extent could this be implemented as an addition to the internet archive?
It's not clear to me that the marginal benefit over the Internet Archive is worth it. Even without published hashes it would still be super surprising for the IA to have backdated content.
This is good criticism, and I'm inclined to agree in part. I do not intend to argue that the marginal value is necessarily great, only that the expected marginal value is much greater than the cost. Here are a couple plausible but maybe less than 50% probability scenarios in which the timestamps can have significant impact on society:
Both western and eastern governments have implemented a good portion of the parts of Orwell's vision that have so far been feasible, in particular mass espionage and forcing content deletion. Editing history in a convincing way has so far been less feasible, but AI might change that, and it isn't clear why we should believe that no government that has a valuable public archive in their jurisdiction would contemplate doing so.
A journalist is investigating a corruption scandal with far-reaching consequences. Archives are important tools, but it just so happens that this one archive until recently had an employee that is connected to a suspect...
In order to prove your innocence, or someone else's guilt, you need to verify and be able to prove what was privately emailed from your organization. Emails are not in the internet archive, but luckily your organization uses cryptographic timestamps for all emails and documents.
Preventing these secnarios requires both convincing large organizations to implement cryptographic timestamps and implementing these timestamps on every significant private archive. Even the implementation cannot be done on anything close to a five-figure budget; engineering time is way more expensive.
It's also very very hard to convince middle managers who don't understand cryptography to publicly post (hashes of) private data for no conceivable benefit.
Good criticism.
My rough budget guess is probably off, as you say. For some reason I just looked at hardware and took a wide margin. For a grant application this has to be ironed out a lot more seriously.
I admit that popularizing the practice for private archives would take a significant effort far beyond a 5-digit budget. I envisioned doing this in collaboration with the internet archive as a first project to reap the most low-hanging fruits, and then hopefully it'd be less difficult to convince other archives to follow suit.
It's worth noting that implementations, commercial services and public ledgers for time-stamping already exist. I imagine scaling, operationalizing and creating interfaces for consumption would be major parts of the project for the internet archive.
Assuming that this is both useful and time or funding constrained, you could be selective in how you roll it out. Images of world leaders and high profile public figures seem most likely to be manipulated and would have the highest negative impact if many people were fooled. You could start there
Thank you, perhaps the first priority should be to quickly operationalize timestamping of newly created content at news organizations. Perhaps even before publication, if they can be convinced to do so.
That was my suspicion too. Similarly to how I can pretty easily find photos and video from the past that aren't photoshopped, I suspect it won't be all that difficult to collect text either.
Actually, the internet archive is achieving exactly this goal unintentionally for economic reasons - they're uploading data onto Filecoin because it is so deeply subsidized by the block reward, which has the indirect effect of checkpointing the data in a cryptographically robust way. https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/6/universal-access-to-all-knowledge-decentralization-experiments-at-the-internet-archive
That is fantastic, hopefully this indicates an organization open to ideas, and if they've been doing this for a while it might be worth "rescuing" those timestamps.
It might be advantageous to do so for content that is in the internet archive. For content that is not, especially non-public content, it might be more feasible to offer the solution as a public service + open source software.