On this week's episode of Yahoo Finance Future Focus, our host Brian McGlennon spoke to Outlier Ventures head of research Jasper De Maere who emphasized the need to combine blockchain technology with artificial intelligence (AI) applications to address prevailing issues related to security, privacy, and centralization. De Meer pointed to weaknesses in the current state of the Internet (web2), particularly regarding data privacy and security practices within artificial intelligence. He called out the synergistic potential of combining blockchain and artificial intelligence, envisioning a future Internet in a better state. De Meer also touched on the challenges posed by artificial intelligence-generated art and its impact on intellectual property rights. To address this problem, he proposed using blockchain technology as a transparent and immutable database to store intellectual property information, ensuring the integrity and authenticity of content generated by artificial intelligence. Furthermore, De Meer highlighted the role of blockchain in democratizing access to AI tools by decentralizing storage infrastructure, and promoting fair value extraction from data.
Video version
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Brian McGlennon: An exciting development has arisen recently which is the intersection between innovations in artificial intelligence and blockchain technology. Now, today in the studio, we're excited to welcome back Jasper De Maire, Research Leader at Outlier Ventures who will tell us a lot more about this. Jasper, welcome to this week's episode of Yahoo Finance Future Focus.
Jasper de Mer: Hey, Brian. Thanks for having me.
Brian McGlennon: Well, 2023 has been a big year for AI developments. We had ChatGPT. We had cool Google. Now, these systems and applications seem to work well using centralized infrastructure. Why does artificial intelligence need blockchain technology?
Jasper de Mer: Yes, you're right. In 2023, it all started at the end of 2022, we saw generative AI capabilities fall into the hands of the masses. Billions of users now use generative AI in their daily lives. And we actually see a meaningful impact in terms of productivity on a personal or work-related level.
So, while all of this is great, I think the fact that these things are spreading across society also highlights the actual issues. The truth is that AI is great, but it also has some drawbacks. And some of the big practices here are questionable practices around data privacy and data security. For example, these are centrally stored databases, which AI then uses data extraction tools from to generate any questions or queries we ask them.
Secondly, there is also the big question of access democracy. Because if this is going to have a meaningful impact on productivity, we need to make sure everyone has access to these tools. This is really where blockchain comes into play. Blockchain opens up the ability to decentralize the way data is stored and through which AI can pull data to extract value from it. Therefore, in the case of data privacy and data security, we believe that blockchain technology has the potential to enhance this in a transparent and immutable way.
And then also in terms of democratization, blockchain decentralizes the infrastructure that AI uses. Again, decentralization and democratization, these are just a few examples of how blockchain can help. But we believe that the convergence of AI and blockchain technology is fundamentally where the future is headed.
Brian McGlennon: One of the big things that's worrying about AI and its development is these kind of arguments that generative AI is just a very sophisticated plagiarist. So how can blockchain technology protect, for example, artists' works and intellectual property rights?
Jasper de Mer: Yeah, I think that's top of mind for a lot of people, as we've obviously seen generative AI in terms of like ChatGPT and Midjourney and other generative digital assets – general artificial intelligence capabilities that are coming online. Intellectual property protection is our top priority, right? Like a lot of artists in different sectors look up to him.
How that would be possible is that you could look at the blockchain as this database where all the IP addresses are stored in a transparent and immutable way. So this record becomes, like, data points about who created the assets, who owns them, who the previous owner was. So all this metadata is stored.
Finally, when you create content using AGI, you can verify it using this history. You can verify your actual assets with what is in the database regarding intellectual property. It seems very trivial, but if you look at the current state of intellectual property, it is very fragmented. Many siled, central databases track intellectual property. So blockchain is just a very open infrastructure for storing all the IP addresses through which we can verify the actual integrity or authenticity of the asset.
Brian McGlennon: Is this why we really need Web3 and not Web2 anymore?
Jasper de Mer: It's an interesting question. Because, currently, if you look at the state of the Internet or Web2, as we currently live, there are some structural issues. There are data privacy and security issues.
Robots are running rampant. There is centralization. So the combination of blockchain and AI will actually be able to pull us into a better state for the Internet.
Brian McGlennon: So, Jasper De Mer, thank you very much for coming again. And thank you for joining us on this week's episode of Yahoo Finance Future Focus.
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