I’m finding it harder and harder to tell whether an image has been generated or not (the main giveaways are disappearing). This is probably going to become a big problem in like half a year’s time. Does anyone know of any proof of legitimacy projects that are gaining traction? I can imagine news orgs being the first to be hit by this problem. Are they working on anything?
Read the beginning of the white paper two - great work! I can tell you put care into this.
Is this similar to how the NFT was supposed to work?
Thanks! And no, this is absolutely nothing like NFTs.
NFTs require the existence of a blockchain and are basically a way of encoding a record of “ownership” on that chain:
If the image at that URL changes (this is called a rug pull) or a competing blockchain is developed, then the NFT is meaningless. The biggest problem though is the wasted effort in maintaining that blockchain. It’s a crazy amount of resources wasted just to establish the origin.
Aletheia is much simpler: your private key is yours and lives on your computer, and your public key lives in DNS or on your website at a given URL. The images, videos, documents, etc. are all tagged with metadata that provides (a) the origin of the public key (that DNS record or your website) and a cryptographic proof that this file was signed by whomever owns the corresponding private key. This ties the file to the origin domain/site, effectively tying it to the reputation of the owners of that site.
The big benefit to this is that it can operate entirely offline once the public keys are fetched. So you could validate 1 million JPEG images in a few minutes, since once you fetch the public key, everything is happening locally.
Thanks for the explanation!
Sounds much more similar to something like NOSTR. I’ve always like the simplicity of using a keypair as an identity.