Ben Goertzel discusses his proposed solution to the fake AI problem in his
decentralized Hyperon AGI design. As AI gets better, it becomes
increasingly difficult to tell whether an image, video, or text is real or
AI generated. He wrote earlier why watermarking won't work and proposes a
system where peers digitally sign messages to each other and using AI for
reputation management.

It looks a lot like my 2008 proposal that I wrote before smart phones,
social media, block chain, or AI existed, but I think it has the same
problem that you can only trust big players, which leads back to
centralization. https://mattmahoney.net/agi2.html

I never found a good solution to this issue. We already have reputation
management, where peers vouch for each other. We trust Amazon or eBay to
vouch for small sellers and user ratings. We trust Google over random
websites to provide reliable data. The Internet would be a much worse place
without these big players to filter out spam and malicious content.

At the time my theory was that AGI could be solved by a communication
network connecting lots of independently managed narrow AI peers who had an
incentive to provide useful services in a hostile environment where
information has negative value. Today it would be more useful to evade
censorship, which really wasn't an issue before the 2010 Arab Spring. Now
the big players are the reason that you can't have Parler or ICEblock in
the US.

The other reason my proposal went nowhere was I immediately abandoned it
rather than spend 2 months writing a simple implementation of the protocol,
the way Marc Andreeson launched the web with the first version of the
Mosaic browser and Apache web server. Instead I estimated the knowledge
collection to automate human labor would cost $1 quadrillion and left it at
that. I wanted to show that the hardware scaled, with O(log n) access time
and O(n log n) storage for a global message pool.

Maybe Ben can solve this. He has been working on AGI since 1998, a year
longer than I have.

-- Matt Mahoney, [email protected]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Ben Goertzel from Eurykosmotron <[email protected]>
Date: Tue, Aug 25, 2026, 2:18 PM
Subject: Toward a Truly Decentralized Digital Provenance Layer
To: <[email protected]>


Introducing the OpenWater protocol, and explaining why it’s badly needed...
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<https://substack.com/redirect/2/eyJlIjoiaHR0cHM6Ly9iZW5nb2VydHplbC5zdWJzdGFjay5jb20vc3Vic2NyaWJlP3V0bV9zb3VyY2U9ZW1haWwmdXRtX2NhbXBhaWduPWVtYWlsLXN1YnNjcmliZSZyPW44NzBqJm5leHQ9aHR0cHMlM0ElMkYlMkZiZW5nb2VydHplbC5zdWJzdGFjay5jb20lMkZwJTJGdG93YXJkLWEtdHJ1bHktZGVjZW50cmFsaXplZC1kaWdpdGFsIiwicCI6MjEyNzM4ODcxLCJzIjozNDk5NDcsImYiOnRydWUsInUiOjM5MDEzNTA3LCJpYXQiOjE3ODc2ODE5MjIsImV4cCI6MjEwMzI1NzkyMiwiaXNzIjoicHViLTAiLCJzdWIiOiJsaW5rLXJlZGlyZWN0In0.Gd3lJOPTiTlPa3gDxXLPi6Ri0rdnGn1z43WmGXteCRg?>
for more
Toward a Truly Decentralized Digital Provenance Layer
<https://substack.com/app-link/post?publication_id=349947&post_id=212738871&utm_source=post-email-title&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=n870j&token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjozOTAxMzUwNywicG9zdF9pZCI6MjEyNzM4ODcxLCJpYXQiOjE3ODc2ODE5MjIsImV4cCI6MTc5MDI3MzkyMiwiaXNzIjoicHViLTM0OTk0NyIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.dtg3JMGQTiRqf1V0r8XdllZXXAE--yJA6h4weA1LEGs>Introducing
the OpenWater protocol, and explaining why it’s badly needed...

Ben Goertzel <https://substack.com/@bengoertzel>
Aug 25
<https://substack.com/@bengoertzel>

<https://substack.com/app-link/post?publication_id=349947&post_id=212738871&utm_source=substack&isFreemail=true&submitLike=true&token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjozOTAxMzUwNywicG9zdF9pZCI6MjEyNzM4ODcxLCJyZWFjdGlvbiI6IuKdpCIsImlhdCI6MTc4NzY4MTkyMiwiZXhwIjoxNzkwMjczOTIyLCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMzQ5OTQ3Iiwic3ViIjoicmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.toB0M_gacdpRyuaGpXfD00FMbID0w2ptlellXFm9_Rk&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=email-reaction&r=n870j>
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<https://open.substack.com/pub/bengoertzel/p/toward-a-truly-decentralized-digital?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=email-restack-comment&action=restack-comment&r=n870j&token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjozOTAxMzUwNywicG9zdF9pZCI6MjEyNzM4ODcxLCJpYXQiOjE3ODc2ODE5MjIsImV4cCI6MTc5MDI3MzkyMiwiaXNzIjoicHViLTM0OTk0NyIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.dtg3JMGQTiRqf1V0r8XdllZXXAE--yJA6h4weA1LEGs&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email>

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*OpenWater aims to provide a simple way for media and data to carry their
own history around, leveraging fully decentralized infrastructure and
without requiring appointment of any company, government or blockchain as
Ministry of Reality*

Writing the a blog post last week on the obvious folly of anti-AI
statistical text watermarking reminded me I haven’t yet said much publicly
about a side project I’ve been playing with, called OpenWater. Which also
deals with watermarking, though of a more traditional and I believe much
more useful sort.

OpenWater is not AGI — it’s a much simpler sort of tool — but it’s a tool I
think both humans and AGIs are going to need rather badly. Basically: *a
fully open and decentralized approach for dealing with deepfakes and
related issues.*

For those who want to plunge into the devilish details – Overall
preliminary design is here
<https://substack.com/redirect/95c7b833-10ad-450e-ba5d-c9f4fd68ea09?j=eyJ1Ijoibjg3MGoifQ.He21_CkfOfKJxaU23rF_Os5N5_-qzSFgpejK31Q3t_8>.
Early prototype code is here
<https://substack.com/redirect/7d1efb3b-b453-4426-9343-8623101aff8a?j=eyJ1Ijoibjg3MGoifQ.He21_CkfOfKJxaU23rF_Os5N5_-qzSFgpejK31Q3t_8>
.

The reasons this sort of thing is needed shouldn’t require too much
elaboration. We’re well into the era in which a photograph no longer proves
that a camera saw something, a recording no longer proves that a person
spoke, and a video no longer proves that the event it depicts ever
occurred. Pretty much any digital artifact can soon be manufactured with
exquisite realism, at low cost, by systems available to millions of people
and billions of software agents. I like to think I’m reasonably good at
spotting fakery — some of the things random people online believe are real
leave me rather perplexed — but “squint at it and see if it feels off”
doesn’t scale as an epistemology, for humans or for AI systems learning how
to think from the internet.

The web of BS gets quite involved these days. Fake material gets presented
as real, and real material gets dismissed as fake — and the second effect,
sometimes called the *liar’s dividend*, may end up more corrosive than the
first, because once nothing can be authenticated, the most powerful actor
in any dispute can simply deny whatever evidence is inconvenient.

So, yes, it feels like we need a far more solid solution to data
provenance, digital provenance, media provenance — validating that
something you see online is what it says it is, or at least seeing clearly
what can and can’t be established about where it came from.

And better yet, we would like a solution to these problems that doesn’t
require placing faith in any sole source of truth, but relies solely on a
decentralized network of participants. (Decentralized networks being the
most reliable and productive source of all sorts of truth in human history,
really.)

The problem of decentralized data provenance is not trivial, but it’s also
not incredibly hard. But I haven’t seen a fully adequate solution out
there, so I felt moved to spell one out and prototype it.

I do understand of course, that there’s a technological problem and then
there’s an adoption problem. What I’ll sketch here is how to solve the
technological problem — I’ve got a prototype codebase, and a nicer version
is being built in the SingularityNET ecosystem. Solving the adoption
problem is the next step, and I’ll say a little about that toward the end,
but I do understand it is probably the more difficult part.
*How not to approach the problem*

First, let me say something about one way NOT to approach the data
provenance problem — which is with AI at the center. Advanced AI can solve
an awful lot of things, but it’s not in itself the core solution to
absolutely EVERYTHING. There is a role for AI here, a fairly important one,
but it’s a subordinate role that I’ll describe a little later.

Specifically: Training machine learning models to tell deepfake pictures
from real pictures, deepfake video from real video, essays written by
William from essays written by an LLM emulating William… this is a losing
proposition. AI-generated images don’t have three fingers or seven fingers
anymore. The statistics of how a certain person writes can be measured —
and then used to guide the production of an LLM-based system that writes
closer and closer exactly that way.

At any given point in time there may be some heuristics that separate
AI-generated stuff from stuff that came out of a camera or a human at a
keyboard, but it’s one side versus the other in a co-evolutionary arms
race, and the fakers are going to win. That much seems near-inevitable to
me. A detector returns a probability, not a history; new generators learn
to evade old detectors; compression and re-editing confuse the classifiers;
and a sufficiently capable attacker can simply train against the detector
itself.

*The stronger question is not “does this look fake?” but “what can this
artifact prove about where it came from, which systems touched it, which
parties signed claims about it, and how it changed along the way?” *This is
the conceptually, pragmatically and politically critical shift from
detection to provenance.
*Watermarks and signed claims*

It is no big revelation that you can watermark things. A camera can put an
invisible watermark into a picture based on the camera hardware, the GPS
coordinates, the time and place. Same for video. A person typing on a
laptop can have biometrics — the fingerprint pad, say — feed into a
watermark embedded in the resulting document. An AI model can watermark its
outputs and sign a claim that it produced them. An editing tool can sign a
claim describing exactly what edits it made. A publisher can sign a claim
that it released this particular version.

Concretely: suppose a photojournalist captures an image. The camera signs a
claim that its sensor produced the original pixels. An editing application
later signs a claim that it cropped the image and adjusted the contrast.
The newspaper signs a claim that it published this version. A robust
invisible watermark or fingerprint embedded in the image then provides a
durable pointer back to those records — so that even after the image has
been screenshotted, recompressed and reposted through a dozen platforms
that strip its metadata, the chain of custody can still be recovered. A
viewer’s browser can then display something like: captured by an attested
camera, edited by a signed tool, published by a newsroom you’ve chosen to
trust, current pixels match the signed commitment. Which is a lot more
informative than a green badge that just says “real.”

None of this guarantees truth in any complete sense. A camera can record a
staged scene, a government can sign propaganda, a newspaper can screw up.
What provenance does is make responsibility visible — it tells you which
claims were made by whom, and whether the artifact still matches those
claims. That’s the raw material out of which people, institutions and AI
systems can form more intelligent judgments.
*The obvious way to build this is the wrong way*

The obvious way to deploy watermarking is a centralized system — *one
company or one government as the gatekeeper of validity.*

Google’s SynthID is a good example of the useful-but-limited version of
this: it embeds imperceptible watermarks into AI-generated images, audio,
video and text within Google’s products, and Google’s tools can later look
for those signals.

Sure, this is considerably better than publishing synthetic media with no
provenance signal at all.

But the limitation is obvious and architectural: the same organization
controls the generator, the watermark, the detector, the update schedule,
the access policy and the interpretation.

You get one controller of policy, who will sooner or later be leaned on or
captured by some government — and some governments are great, some… are
not. And even great ones have a way of eventually or at least periodically
becoming much less so.

Also, security-wise, with the centralized approach, you get a single point
of failure: one bug or one hack into that one thing, and everyone is
compromised at once.

And you probably end up with incompatible watermarking fiefdoms on
different computing platforms — an Apple-versus-Android sort of situation —
the sort of thing likely to take a decade or more to sort itself out, if it
ever does.

On the whole, *this is a perfect case for neither monopoly nor chaos — i.e.
for an open, decentralized, interoperation-focused ecosystem.*

I should be clear that my critique isn’t aimed at open standards. The C2PA
coalition (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) has built an
important open standard for Content Credentials — tamper-evident records of
origin and edit history that work something like a nutrition label for
media — and my own OpenWater proposal is designed to be compatible with
C2PA rather than to replace it.

But an open format is necessary rather than sufficient. The repositories,
the watermark resolution, the key histories, the revocation lists and the
trust decisions also have to be plural and auditable, or you’ve just
rebuilt the same bottleneck one layer up.
*The OpenWater design*

So OpenWater is *an open framework for making provenance credentials
durable while keeping the trust architecture decentralized*.

Boiled down, it combines a handful of simple ideas:

   -

   whomever produces or transforms a piece of content — a camera, an AI
   model, an editing tool, a publisher, a software agent — signs precise
   claims about what it did, using an open credentialing framework;
   -

   the claims get packaged into an interoperable credential, preferably
   C2PA-compatible;
   -

   a robust invisible watermark or media fingerprint provides the route
   back to the credential even when ordinary metadata has been stripped away;
   -

   the credentials are stored and resolved by many independent services —
   some publicly owned anchors, some private companies, a distributed network
   rather than one mandatory database;
   -

   and each user, institution or AI system applies its own trust policy to
   the evidence, rather than pressing some universal “truth” button.

<https://substack.com/redirect/b8cc26ca-a56f-4a84-b445-58c952b3cb25?j=eyJ1Ijoibjg3MGoifQ.He21_CkfOfKJxaU23rF_Os5N5_-qzSFgpejK31Q3t_8>

*The life of one artifact: signed claims pile up as it’s made, an invisible
watermark keeps pointing back to them, and anyone can check the evidence
later — against their own trust policy.*

None of this is especially deep or crazy — it’s just “how things should
work.” What is peculiar is that nothing like this is rolled out and widely
adopted already.

The last item on the above bullet list deserves a bit of emphasis, because
provenance verdicts are not naturally binary. Different pieces of evidence
get watermarked into an artifact, and members of the network weigh them.

Maybe this image came from a camera that appears to have been in Iraq; it
carries a fingerprint reading from a particular guy; but there’s no
liveness detection attached to that reading, so we can’t rule out that
somebody took his finger — it was a battle zone, after all. So we can say
the image was captured on his camera with his fingerprint present, and we
can’t say for sure that he took it.

Different parties, with different priors and different trust bundles, can
reach different judgments from the same evidence — and the public can
inspect all of it. A science journal, an indigenous media network, a
national archive, a dissident collective and a social platform can accept
different sets of signers while speaking the same underlying protocol.

What you get isn’t a Ministry of Truth, but rather a shared grammar of
evidence … and a community using this grammar to communicate.

Along these lines, there also some very relevant things OpenWater
deliberately refuses to do

   -

   it doesn’t appoint a global authority to decide which institutions are
   truthful;
   -

   it doesn’t claim that signed media depicts an unstaged event;
   -

   it doesn’t require creators to reveal their civil identities;
   -

   it doesn’t treat the absence of a watermark as proof of fakery.

This sort of design discipline is what keeps a provenance layer from
mutating into censorship infrastructure.
*Where AI comes in*

The crux of OpenWater doesn’t require AI or anything else sophisticated
beyond basic watermarking tech and decentralized networks. However, there
is an important use of AI in a critical supporting role: *reputation
management.*

If you have a decentralized network of parties storing credentials,
resolving watermarks and vouching for signers, you face the question of how
you trust them. And that is not a digital watermarking problem — it’s a
reputation problem. You need a reputation system for the participants, and
then, inevitably, people will try to game the reputation system. This is
where you do bottom out in AI: you need AI to recognize the patterns of
actors faking good behavior in order to accumulate undeserved reputation.

We worked out a lot of the mechanics of decentralized reputation systems
years ago in the SingularityNET context — published some papers, built some
prototypes — and the adversarial part, spotting sophisticated
reputation-gaming, is exactly the sort of pattern recognition machine
learning is good at. So: AI to police the reputation layer, not AI to
declare what’s a deepfake. The role is subordinate but real.
<https://substack.com/redirect/e266a95e-bc73-4ca7-b3b7-2999f5b87776?j=eyJ1Ijoibjg3MGoifQ.He21_CkfOfKJxaU23rF_Os5N5_-qzSFgpejK31Q3t_8>

*The cast of characters: signers make claims, a plural commons stores and
vouches, verifiers judge — and no one owns the middle.*
*Blockchains yes, wired-in tokens no*

Another technology that is very helpful for OpenWater, but is intentionally
not placed at its center, is blockchain.

This kind of decenrralized system has extremely good reasons to make use of
blockchains — public chains are a natural place to anchor compact
commitments, key transparency logs and revocations. But *something like
OpenWater shouldn’t live exclusively on any one blockchain, and it
certainly shouldn’t have an exclusive cryptocurrency attached to it.*

Storage, indexing, certification and auditing all cost money, and different
operators will fund them differently — some with token-backed
infrastructure and staking, some with subscriptions, public funding,
institutional budgets or plain old cloud invoices. The protocol should
allow all of these and mandate none of them. A provenance standard that
major countries, regulated industries and ordinary businesses reject
because it forces exposure to a speculative asset has failed before its
cryptography ever gets tested — near-universal adoption is the security
model here.

So OpenWater is designed as token-agnostic and chain-agnostic: chains as
optional trust backends, not sovereigns of the system.
*Why AGIs need this too*

I said at the start that this is a tool both humans and AGIs need, and I
totally meant it…. The next generation of AI systems will be shaped by vast
streams of images, text, audio, video, scientific observations, simulations
and agent-generated experience. If those streams arrive without provenance,
model builders can’t reliably answer basic questions: was this created by a
person or by another model? Was it licensed? Was it edited, and by whom?
Which instrument produced this measurement? Has this same synthetic
artifact been copied through a thousand datasets?

Basically: Models trained on untraceable data inherit untraceable
assumptions, while models trained on well-provenanced data can reason about
source quality, distinguish observation from simulation, respect licensing
and consent, and avoid amplifying the same hidden error through recursive
synthetic-data loops.

And OpenWater-style credentials don’t have to stop at public media — the
same machinery can attach provenance to training examples, dataset
versions, model outputs and agent actions. A model can state which dataset
version contributed to a result; a robot can sign which sensors supplied an
observation; an agent can identify which tools and which human
authorizations were involved in some consequential action it took. For a
decentralized network of AI systems — the sort of AGI network I’ve spent
most of the last decade directly working toward — provenance is the
connective tissue between knowledge, reputation and accountability.
*From prototype to adoption*

So… I vibe-coded a simple prototype of the OpenWater framework a while
back, and a colleague in the SingularityNET / SingularityDAO ecosystem
built a nicer version
<https://substack.com/redirect/7d1efb3b-b453-4426-9343-8623101aff8a?j=eyJ1Ijoibjg3MGoifQ.He21_CkfOfKJxaU23rF_Os5N5_-qzSFgpejK31Q3t_8>,
which is still an early prototype but shows the idea clearly… The plan is
to roll the technology out through a partnership between the SingularityNET
Foundation and BGI Labs, staying compatible with the broader Content
Credentials ecosystem throughout.

And then it comes down to adoption, which is always the hard part.
ASI:Chain may be a help here — when we get OmegaClaw agents running on
ASI:Chain, producing and handling media at scale with an effective
decentralized watermarking and provenance framework built in from the
start, then … as we said back when I lived in Australia … Bob’s your uncle.
Agents are in some ways an easier adoption vector than humans: they can be
configured to sign and verify by default, without anyone having to change
their habits.

I won’t pretend watermarking fascinates me as much as core AGI cognition
algorithms. But it does seem an important thing to have in place, so that
AIs and humans alike can take a decent stab at telling bullshit from
reality on the internet.

For sure there’s a long queue of other bullshit-detection problems waiting
behind this one, but decentralized, impartial, rational measurement of the
evidence regarding the provenance of digital artifacts — this one, at
least, is solvable, and mostly solved at the level of design.

Nobody can own truth in the philosophical sense — truth is a relationship
among minds, evidence and the world. But societies do get to decide who
owns the infrastructure through which evidence is preserved and contested.
The centralized answer is that a few tech companies or states should
maintain the authoritative memory of digital events; the nihilistic answer
is that nothing can be trusted and every claim is just power in drag.
OpenWater is a bet on a third answer: evidence organized as an open,
decentralized, interoperable commons, with judgment left plural,
distributed across human and machine communities. The future of truth
should be a protocol, not a product.

*(The same machinery, incidentally, turns out to be useful for doing a less
centralized job of proof of humanity — establishing that there’s an actual
human on the other end of an interaction, without making one company’s
biometric orb the gatekeeper of the human internet. That’s the subject of
the next post in this series.)*
*Sources and further reading*

OpenWater: A Comprehensive Framework for Robust Provenance Watermarking
<https://substack.com/redirect/6c5107a1-09d7-4182-800e-dd95f639afa2?j=eyJ1Ijoibjg3MGoifQ.He21_CkfOfKJxaU23rF_Os5N5_-qzSFgpejK31Q3t_8>
— the underlying OpenWater design and public entry point. See also early
prototype code here
<https://substack.com/redirect/7d1efb3b-b453-4426-9343-8623101aff8a?j=eyJ1Ijoibjg3MGoifQ.He21_CkfOfKJxaU23rF_Os5N5_-qzSFgpejK31Q3t_8>
.

C2PA — the open Content Credentials standard
<https://substack.com/redirect/0dd6d789-7c13-42f6-9b61-f2df4463dc1e?j=eyJ1Ijoibjg3MGoifQ.He21_CkfOfKJxaU23rF_Os5N5_-qzSFgpejK31Q3t_8>
— open technical standards for cryptographically verifiable media
provenance.

C2PA explainer on durable Content Credentials
<https://substack.com/redirect/a69b57bf-be4f-4244-813c-d91e262eb2d2?j=eyJ1Ijoibjg3MGoifQ.He21_CkfOfKJxaU23rF_Os5N5_-qzSFgpejK31Q3t_8>
— why soft bindings such as watermarks and fingerprints help recover
credentials after metadata is removed.

Google DeepMind SynthID
<https://substack.com/redirect/b0028d6f-f7c3-40bb-bf2c-a652deb91505?j=eyJ1Ijoibjg3MGoifQ.He21_CkfOfKJxaU23rF_Os5N5_-qzSFgpejK31Q3t_8>
— a prominent vendor-operated watermarking system for AI-generated media.

C2PA implementation guidance
<https://substack.com/redirect/d7d87760-c43a-4c7d-bc18-c9f9615d9bac?j=eyJ1Ijoibjg3MGoifQ.He21_CkfOfKJxaU23rF_Os5N5_-qzSFgpejK31Q3t_8>
— practical guidance on manifest repositories, invisible watermarking and
fingerprint fallback.

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