To Survive the New Era of Robot Spam, Look to Crypto’s History

This is David Z. Morris, filling in for Michael Casey to talk about so-called artificial intelligence, the threats it poses to the future – and how crypto could help mitigate them.

As Michael would surely agree, there are no real days off in crypto. I was reminded myself when I recently spent a long weekend at the fantastic Readercon fiction convention. Inevitably, I missed some important crypto stories, but I also got some up-close insight into another looming novelty: the existential threat that automated large language models (LLMs) like GPT3 pose to the entire internet.

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That might sound hyperbolic. But at Readercon, I met Neil Clarke, founder and editor of the top-tier science fiction magazine Clarkesworld, which along with other fiction publications has become a canary in the coal mine of A.I. run amok. The rise of ChatGPT has inundated these journals with a flood of fake GPT-generated story submissions, a plague so severe Clarkesworld was forced to temporarily pause submissions this February, threatening the work and livelihoods of real authors.

“I’ve been calling it spam,” says Clarke, “Because that’s what it is. I sometimes refuse to even call it ‘artificial intelligence.’ You can’t humanize these things. It’s not like the science fiction of movies where it’s aware. It’s a statistical [language] model.”

The mention of spam should raise the antenna of longtime cryptocurrency watchers: the same problem lay at the very origins of Bitcoin.

Between 1998 and 2002, computer scientist Adam Back developed the concept of “Hashcash,” primarily intended to combat e-mail spam by requiring a tiny payment to send one. Back and his ideas became foundational to the development of Bitcoin, and he’s now CEO of crypto developer Blockstream.

Two decades later, with robotic barbarian hordes poised to swamp human communication systems, it might be time to revisit the Hashcash concept.

Large Language Hustlers

“ChatGPT came out in late November,” Clarke says, “And we immediately started seeing submissions using it. The first…