If there’s a technological solution that could, somehow, provide a ubiquitous means of walking back from image discovered on the internet through the whole chain of custody to either a specific camera or a specific prompt, then yes there’s definitely a market and a need for that in society, and both the market and the need are going to be substantially greater, even after this AI-summer collapses, but I’ll be damned if I know how you’d get to the technical solution without first achieving the legal momentum necessary to make it ubiquitous enough to actually be useful for that grand of a purpose. It’s the chicken/egg problem, or maybe more accurately the “stuffing-everything—back-into-Pandora’s-box” problem. Humanity has already created sufficient original imagery without a blockchain (or whatever) technical provenance model to allow for an essentially infinite remixing of just that existing body of images we didn’t know we’d have a need for provenance for into an enormous corpus of slop we also don’t have provenance for. Yes it would be good if there already existed a blockchain containing a Markov chain back to every original work of natural intellect, but how do you build that while the models are already regurgitating and chewing the weights they’ve already learned?

I mean I do think you’ve (also) noticed one of the wicked hard problems, it’s just I’ve had similar conversations in the photography and cinematography and VFX worlds going back more than 20 years, long before generative AI was a thing, but now they are a thing I think we’re stuck in a world where we need to understand that image + attestation != truth, and never really did.

But if you do figure it out, and somehow there exists a future in which we somehow never let Schrödinger’s stinking cat out of Schrödinger’s stinking bag, I’ll be the first to invest.