January 25 2022, 01:17

Today, I learned with interest about an attempt in 2004 to sell the painting “Landscape with a Stream” by Marinus Kukkuk at a Sotheby’s auction as a work by Shishkin. The fraudsters, allegedly from Russia, almost succeeded. They even slightly retouched it to make it look like a Shishkin.

Plus, now there is this insanity with NFT tokens, where some idiots buy links to files on the internet from others. Alongside the growing ability to manufacture custom realities—an array of these Deep Fakes, and the creation of virtual worlds hardly distinguishable from real ones, if not yet as of today, then quite soon… It makes one think –

I predict that very soon all new video content will have a digital signature, and video playback devices will be able to read it, all video recording devices will incorporate it into the video, and some time later, they will figure out how to integrate digital signatures into text. Into simple text. Imagine, you copy-paste just a piece of news into a form, and it tells you – yes, this is a fragment of text from, say, RBK or Bloomberg, and this information is “encoded” in the text itself, not somewhere on the internet where some Google-like entity, which RBK or Bloomberg told you about. It’s like stylometry, but in reverse. Naturally, it will work on texts of a sufficient size to hide this info, and AI has to be involved in their writing, albeit in tertiary roles, to determine how and where to dissolve metadata and accordingly modify the text.

Maybe, as a digital signature, Chinese characters attached to the text might be used, which can easily carry information about the “checksum” and the author. There are 74,605 Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters in Unicode, so literally a handful could prove to be a very simple and compact option for a digital signature. Currently, MD5 exists, but it is very sensitive to minor changes. For example, if it is made for the entire text, it will not show the authenticity of a fragment.

And all photo, audio, text information lacking such a fingerprint will be regarded as junk, as a possible forgery, as something suspicious, possibly stolen without permission. For instance, the use of deep fake, Photoshop version 2030 will simply be unnecessary, because such fabrications will be dismissed right from the start as unworthy.