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Artificial intelligence is growing at a rate considered wondrous by some and frightening by others—yet there seems to be no question that this rate of growth will increase. What started as a curious and interesting experiment with basic commands and questions, as well as fun reworkings of classical paintings, has grown into what could plausibly become a trillion-dollar industry in the foreseeable future.
It is unquestionable that the creation of large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT has paved the way for groundbreaking developments. With ChatGPT and other similar AI tools, a few commands can create a long piece of content for research and information purposes, articles, code, and even images and videos.
More terrifying, however, is AI’s ability to mimic humans—so well that it is sometimes indistinguishable from real flesh and blood. These deepfakes are increasingly becoming not just a simple nuisance but a threat to national security. For example, when a deepfake-created video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky where he told his troops to surrender to Russia in the early days of the war. Discussions about banning deepfakes have been circulating for some time, but—so far—nothing concrete has been implemented.
AI-generated history
Just as sinister as deepfakes, however, is AI’s overall role in preserving facts. Indeed, while many consider artificial intelligence to be unbiased, AI is subject to the very same biases and lies as its creators. DeekSeek exemplifies this. An AI tool developed by the Chinese, it will refuse to utter any mention of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, for example, essentially erasing this incident from history. In fact, users can watch the chatbot do this before their very eyes.
While governments have been rewriting history for centuries, from burning books in the Nazi era to changing text with the Gutenberg Press, AI represents a new dynamic in the permanence with which this can be done digitally and the speed at which false information can reach people via the internet. In addition, AI is used by many for research, relied upon as a reliable information source, and is increasingly used in classrooms.
Despite these ethical concerns, however, tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon Web Services are steamrolling forward and integrating AI tools like DeepSeek into their cloud services. This means that anyone using their infrastructure—and that’s basically the majority of people with access to the internet—will be exposed to an AI tool that will only tell the truth if it’s programmed to. How can we trust a biased tool to preserve historical information or data?
Blockchain-based solutions
It’s clear that in a future where humans and AI increasingly co-exist with each other, we have to find another way of preserving information, images, and—most importantly—historical facts. A solution where this data cannot be erased, tampered with, or re-written—and blockchain is the only technology that provides this solution today.
A blockchain is an immutable ledger where information can never be deleted or altered. Any transaction or other data is stored in the blockchain forever once it has been recorded. A fitting way to preserve history in a world where records depend on the whims of politicians and other powerful individuals. This is perhaps the most noble of use cases for blockchain’s censorship resistance—not an attempt to evade, but to preserve.
Several ventures are already working on creating blockchain-based solutions specifically designed to preserve history and facts. This includes Story, a blockchain designed to turn intellectual property from writing, music, paintings, or simply ideas into tokenized assets to be stored and even traded on-chain.
A permanent cloud
Meanwhile, Arweave is a blockchain that offers a solution to store any data in a decentralized cloud forever—or for at least 200 years, guaranteed. This model contrasts traditional cloud services, like Google Cloud or Amazon Web Services, which underpin the entire internet.
If you have photos or Word documents stored on your Google Drive, for example, they are stored in the cloud—but this cloud storage is vulnerable to breaches, synching problems, or accidental—or deliberate—deletions. Data stored in the cloud can also be censored or deleted by a government or other authority, which puts a big question mark over the idea of storing any important facts of historical data “in the cloud.”
Permanent, decentralized cloud solutions eliminate all these problems. Once it’s uploaded, it is stored forever—it cannot be tampered with, deleted, or altered in any way. You can always say who uploaded the data and when and what the original information contained in it is. It’s a perfect solution for information that needs to be preserved, like historical records.
It’s also impossible to pass deepfakes off as a real thing on a permanent blockchain cloud network because it would be immediately clear who the creator of the fake video or image is. Equally, the origin of legitimate announcements could be easily verified, so never again would anyone have any doubts about the orders a president is giving to his troops in the middle of a major conflict.
Finally, this tamperproof method of data storage also guarantees the provenance of information, which can be incredibly important in arbitrating “he said, she said” debates which so often stand in the way of verifying historical facts. At a time when these facts are increasingly under threat from technology that can create life-like deepfakes of politicians and celebrities, it’s time we explore the only solution that can truly preserve history.
