The more I think about what we have built with the AI economy the more I feel uneasy.
It's not because the technology isn't amazing it really is.
I get uncomfortable because of a quiet assumption that is built into every large language model every image generator and every recommendation engine that has been used by many people.
This assumption is that data is, around us.
It exists like the weather or air something you just move through without owing anyone.
The people who wrote drew,. Contributed to online forums and discussions creating the data that our AI systems use were not just doing it for free.
They were not volunteers.
They just did not have a way to prove that they were owed something.
They did not have a system to prove it. They just did not have a way to show that something was true.
That is the problem I keep talking about. It is exactly the problem that Proof of Attribution and the
$OPEN token are trying to solve. Or, at least make it clear that we cannot pretend it does not exist.
The idea of Proof of Attribution is simple. If you can record which parts of the training data were used to create the model outputs then you can see where everything comes from. You can see the history of how it was made. The model does not just create text or images out of air. It creates them from something.. That something was made by someone.
$OPEN is built on this idea. It wants to pay the people who made the data in real time. It wants to pay them based on how much their data helped create the output. Pay the writer who came up with the words. Pay the programmer who wrote the code that helped the computer complete the sentence. Pay the photographer who took the pictures that helped the computer learn what is beautiful.
I really feel something when I think about this idea. It has a right and wrong to it that a lot of other crypto ideas do not have. This is not an idea that sounds good but does not really do anything. This is a response to a problem that is still happening.
When I think about it more I start to wonder about some things.
The big question is: how do you actually know who had an influence on something? Figuring out who did what in machine learning is not like saying where you got information from in a paper. A computer program that learned from a lot of documents does not use any one document in the way a writer would quote someone. The way it works is by looking at a lot of things at the time and using all of them to make a decision. It is hard to follow.
You can try to figure out who had an influence and there are some ideas about how to do that but it is not perfect. If the way you figure out who had an influence does not pay some people enough and pays others much and it probably will then you do not have a fair system. You just have a version of the same system that is not fair but now it has a token. That is not the thing.
The idea of crypto is still about fairness. The crypto use cases should have that. The crypto use cases should be about making things right. The crypto use cases should be about being fair to everyone.
The crypto is supposed to be a response, to a real problem. The crypto is supposed to be a way to make things right. The crypto is supposed to be fair.
There is also the question of what gets credited and what does not. Good quality data like papers, published books and licensed photography will probably work well with this system.. The more messy and hard to track kinds of things that people contribute to culture like the feeling of a specific subreddit or how a small group of people write about sad things or funny things or when they are frustrated with technology will not work as well. This kind of background is real and it is valuable but it is almost impossible to say who made it. The people who created it will probably not get paid for it just like they do not get paid for it now. This is the part that I think is really important.
Then there is the part about institutions, which nobody in the
$OPEN ecosystem wants to talk about. The big AI labs, the ones that are actually doing the work and making the models that are used in big companies and government contracts and things that people use every day do not want to use a system that says who made what. This is because it would show that their models are using work that people did for free and it would take money away from them and give it to the people who made the work. Some smaller groups and companies might try to use this system. The big ones, with the most data and the most users and the most power will fight it. They will go to court. They will try to change the laws so that they do not have to use the Proof of Attribution system in the places that matter.
Yet I keep coming back to why this still matters even when things get tough. Because getting accepted by the law and institutions is not the way to make a difference. What Proof of Attribution does even if it is not perfect is create a standard. It gives us a way to talk about things. It gives us a set of records on the blockchain that make it easier to figure out where data comes from in a way that has never been possible before. Copyright law took a time to develop and it was a messy process with a lot of special cases and unfair situations that helped people who already had power more than creators. But having copyright law changed the way we think and talk about owning creative work. Proof of Attribution could do something with the underlying infrastructure.
$OPEN if it gets used by a number of people in the AI industry sets a precedent that data is not just something that is available everywhere. That it has value. That it belongs to someone. That the owner can be. Paid. Once that precedent is set on the blockchain even if it is small and not perfect at first it becomes much harder to argue that taking amounts of data without paying for it is okay or natural. It becomes a choice that people have to make. A choice that is visible to everyone.
I think that change in the way we think about things is worth something. Maybe it is worth a lot.
I also think we should be honest about what
$OPEN 's as a financial investment separate from what it hopes to achieve. Token economies that rely on companies to adopt them tend to have limits on how successful they can be. For
$OPEN to be really successful AI labs and big companies need to build systems that give credit to creators, which requires either government pressure or a clear signal, from the market that users and creators will switch to alternatives that respect attribution. Neither of those things is happening on a scale right now. People who are buying
$OPEN because they think this infrastructure will be widely adopted in two years are making a bet that institutions will change faster than they usually do.
That is not being negative. The map is just not the same as the world.
What I think is that the problem Proof of Attribution is trying to solve is a problem it is very important and it is a serious issue in a way that most other crypto projects are not. The way it works is really new. The connection between the tokens and the main goal. Which is to pay people for what they did. Is stronger here than in most other token systems I have thought about. The problems are big and deep. They will not be solved just by being clever.
But I keep thinking about this one thing I just cannot stop thinking about it: every time there is a change in how people value the work of artists. Like when royalties were invented or when groups of artists started working together to license their work or when streaming services started paying artists. It did not start with the big companies agreeing to pay. It started with the artists themselves saying they will not work for free. The power to make a change has always been with the artists, not the companies. If
$OPEN can get enough artists to join. Artists putting their name on their work enough records of who did what, on the blockchain enough people talking about how unfair it is when artists do not get paid. Then it does not matter as much if the big companies use it or not. What matters is that there is a record of who did what and everyone knows it.
That might be the reason to support this project. It is not that it will solve all problems. It will make things that are hidden visible.. Sometimes that is where change starts.
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