Did he write the sentence you read right now? Has AI created the photo you just saw online? The shocking and controversial story that made a really real boost, or a disinformation fueled by AI?
These are questions with which Clara Tsao fought for years, ranging from the protection of national security (where she was the CTO of a team focused on the fight against local extremism) to the creation of a better internet, where she is co-founder of the Trust & Safety Professional Association. (In a way, she also finds the time to be president of scholarship holders of the presidential innovation of the White House and to serve as main advisor at Tech against terrorism.)
“For me, it is always a question of, how to bring more democracy on the web, because it is an open network that everyone should have the fundamental human law to access,” explains Tsao, a founding officer of the Flecoin Foundation and who will appear on stage at the top of AI at consensus 2025.
Tsao knows that AI, in a sense, makes all these works more difficult. FLECOIN is therefore focused on using the blockchain to ensure digital authenticity and sniff counterfeits. “The AI will turbocharger everything we see today, for good and for bad,” explains Tsao. “And in the end, I think everyone wants to know if they speak to an AI or a human.”
The interview was condensed and slightly modified for more clarity.
How did AI complicated the mission of an open and confidence internet?
Clara Tsao: Thus, one of the greatest risks with AI is, how can we know if something is generated by AI or the bot, compared to something we know could be a human in the loop. And when I was working on subjects such as the fight against foreign influence operations, how do you prove that a bad actor came in fact from a country we know could try to intervene with us?
Can you give an example?
There was a period, I think that in 2016, when Facebook in fact eliminated a bunch of media channels from Russia, because it was linked to the Internet research agency, which is a group that tried definitively to push propaganda during the elections. It is therefore a question of being able to prove the source of information and to ensure that people are not victims of disinformation.
And counterfeits become easier and easier to create, thanks to AI …
RIGHT. And with images generated by AI and news generated by AI, it could be easy for very bad players to use this technology for evil.
Can you connect the points of how the blockchain helps to solve this problem?
One thing that is great in decentralized technologies – and specifically decentralized storage – is that you can really prove how the data is modified over time, because we store each data element by hatching, not by location.
So let’s say that we have a data set and that we fear that the data may be handled. Perhaps a government arrives and changes something so that it can adapt to its political program. There are many reasons why the preservation of information is more important than ever, and this is something that we can absolutely do with Feclooin.
Who do you work with?
We have worked with tons of incredible non -profit organizations over the years, such as Muckrock, to make sure that we can not only archive and preserve critical information, but also make sure that it is unexpected, ensuring that it is resilient. For example, if it is information that journalists draw, that we can have resilient copies all over the world. We can also use the same technology to really prove that this journalist has taken a certain photo.
In some elections, there could be disinformation as to whether something really happened or not, and you can ask the photographers to use decentralized technologies. And we have a ton of business applications that are being built above Feclooin today, which help check that this image has been taken from this device at this stage.
It is really powerful in terms of daily journalism, but also to be able to be eligible in the courts. In Ukraine, there could be war photos that could be out of context. And we are able to preserve a number of key photographs which can one day be eligible before the international criminal courts for human rights situations.
How do you now think about Fleccoin’s mission?
We can help check if you talk to AI or a human. We can help store data to a cost fraction. We can make sure that the data is more precise, as most AI data sets are built on the formation of tonnes of data. And data storage is very expensive. Our goal is therefore to make the storage of data affordable for everyone and to ensure that people also make as much data as possible, so that AI agents are not only trained from a subset.
And finally, we can have a place where it is not only a question of monopolies that can access tons of data. People can have the choice of where to store it, how to store it. They are therefore not locked in an enclosed garden where they can never go out.
To like. Thank you Clara. Go to Toronto in consensus!
Jeff Wilser will host the AI summit at the 2025 consensus and is the host of the popular AI: the decentralized AI podcast.
