EA - Time-stamping: An urgent, neglected AI safety measure by Axel Svensson

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Time-stamping: An urgent, neglected AI safety measure, published by Axel Svensson on January 30, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.TL;DRI 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 & SOLUTIONAs 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:EFFECTIVEIt 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.URGENTNeed 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.TRACTABLEWe 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.CHEAPTimestamping n pieces of content comprising a total of b bytes will incur a one-time cost for processin...