IMHO they're symbiotic. Generative AI destroys trust; crypto lets you function in a trust-less world.
The killer app for generative AI is going to be propaganda. This hasn't entered the discourse yet because nobody wants to advertise that they're running a propaganda mill. I suspect they already exist though - there've been a number of news articles I've read recently where I'm like "I'm pretty sure somebody fed a tweet or police blotter into GPT-4 instead of writing this."
This works now because people are accustomed to trusting what they read. Once the channel has been flooded and it becomes cheap to make it look like your views are echoed by 1000 mainstream news media outlets and millions of people online, people will just stop believing everything they read. Similarly once any idiot can have ChatGPT write a college-level term paper, the skill of writing at the college level won't be worth anything. When you can have ChatGPT write a recommendation letter with a 15-second prompt, it ceases to be a useful signal for how much you believe in the person you're recommending. When you have GMail expand your one-sentence e-mail into 4 paragraphs with generative AI and then the recipient summarizes the 4 paragraph e-mail back into one-sentence, maybe you should've just written the one sentence to begin with.
The value in blockchain technologies is in unforgeability, scarcity, and forced consensus. In a world where forgery is trivially easy, content is trivially abundant, and nobody believes anybody else, a technology that ensures that mutually-distrusting computer systems all represent the same data gets quite valuable.
> The value in blockchain technologies is in unforgeability, scarcity, and forced consensus. In a world where forgery is trivially easy, content is trivially abundant, and nobody believes anybody else, a technology that ensures that mutually-distrusting computer systems all represent the same data gets quite valuable.
And how does blockchain make this work? By making authenticity too expensive for spammers, you've made it too expensive for 90+% of the population. The spammers/propagandists have orders of magnitudes more money than me.
By going back to how an economy is supposed to work: you exchange money of known supply for items of value, and making the hard tradeoffs about which items of value are worth spending money on.
I suspect that the actual cryptocurrency that wins out here hasn't been invented yet, or it'll be a layer on top of Ethereum. It needs to actually function like a currency, and it needs to give you mechanisms to trade items of value in the real world, goods and services, for future goods and services. None of this "it's just a wildly variable front over USD that you can profit off of swing trades."
Eh, when that one sentence is "fuck you, pay me", I think the paragraphs are a necessity of modern polite society. Maybe some people would be encouraged by the 4 word sentence rather than the 4 paragraph version, but I remain unconvinced.
Crypto is a more direct way of saying "fuck you, pay me". This is why it's currently less popular (although this will probably turn around when it becomes "fuck yeah, pay me!"), but the no-bullshit transaction going on is that something of value which can't be spoofed is changing hands. The benefit of that is that you're going to think very hard about what you exchange for that. (Well, eventually, once all the idiots have offered up their money for scams.)
The killer app for generative AI is going to be propaganda. This hasn't entered the discourse yet because nobody wants to advertise that they're running a propaganda mill. I suspect they already exist though - there've been a number of news articles I've read recently where I'm like "I'm pretty sure somebody fed a tweet or police blotter into GPT-4 instead of writing this."
This works now because people are accustomed to trusting what they read. Once the channel has been flooded and it becomes cheap to make it look like your views are echoed by 1000 mainstream news media outlets and millions of people online, people will just stop believing everything they read. Similarly once any idiot can have ChatGPT write a college-level term paper, the skill of writing at the college level won't be worth anything. When you can have ChatGPT write a recommendation letter with a 15-second prompt, it ceases to be a useful signal for how much you believe in the person you're recommending. When you have GMail expand your one-sentence e-mail into 4 paragraphs with generative AI and then the recipient summarizes the 4 paragraph e-mail back into one-sentence, maybe you should've just written the one sentence to begin with.
The value in blockchain technologies is in unforgeability, scarcity, and forced consensus. In a world where forgery is trivially easy, content is trivially abundant, and nobody believes anybody else, a technology that ensures that mutually-distrusting computer systems all represent the same data gets quite valuable.