Written by: Haotian
The programmable IP project @StoryProtocol, which was led by @a16z twice, seems to have never given up the vision of building an on-chain Renaissance for "creators", even though it has experienced two major narrative waves: NFT image artists and the digital virtual world of the metaverse. Story Protocol has been trying to solve problems such as "copyright protection, royalty dividends, and data privacy". With the prosperity of generative AI, the demand for programmable IP layers has become more rigid. Why?
1) A large number of generative AI tools have emerged, including Dall-E, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, etc. Users can generate various artistic and photographic images by entering simple text prompts, but the large model training process behind this is worrying, such as:
Does the data capture of original artworks comply with copyright protection regulations? Will the large model that pursues differentiation break the legal and ethical boundaries in the fine-tuning scenario? When AI samples and combines original materials, the "blurring" of content ownership and copyright boundaries will harm the interests of creators, etc.
2) Unlike the on-chain virtual world that NFT and the metaverse are trying to build, every iterative evolution of generative AI must be based on large-scale data training. Therefore, data privacy infringement and copyright disputes will be inevitable. The unilateral restrictions of centralized organizations such as Open AI seem to alleviate some of the problems, but this actually sacrifices the faster development of generative AI.
If a modular programmable IP layer is used to generate AI to expand the data resource library while building complex IP chain accounting, ownership confirmation, circulation and other infrastructure, it may be a powerful supplement to the data abuse and standardization issues in large model training.
3) As shown below, Story Protocol provides creator IP with Licensing Module, Royalty Module, Dispute Module, etc. When the user's data assets are tokenized on Story Protocol, they will have a series of module components, thereby realizing various functional protections for the on-chain IP.
Overall, Story Protocol’s vision is too grand, which makes the implementation of its technology applications more tortuous and challenging. Fortunately, from NFT, metaverse to generative AI, the story that Story Protocol wants to tell is always on the main theme. The narrative is changing, but the problems it wants to solve have always been the main needs, and are becoming more and more rigid.
In short, in terms of intellectual property protection alone, the story that Story Protocol wants to write is still full of unknowns. However, the development of the AI+Crypto track is not isolated, and AI as a Narrative will play a key role in the subsequent development of the industry.
Representative products and protocols continue to emerge in the areas of decentralized AI computing power aggregation platform + decentralized verifiable computing reasoning service + decentralized digital property IP protection service and decentralized DePIN mining service. The combination and superposition of them will add more weight to the existence of Crypto Buff for AI.
