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Gateway and Heurist: Forging Data Rights and Ownership in Decentralized AI

Gateway Team

04 Jun 2024 — 4 min read

Gateway x Heurist

Gateway is proud to have Heurist join its vast network of projects building across the DePIN and AI space. Heurist is a DePIN protocol for AI inferences and an AI ecosystem built on top of the inference API service provided by decentralized GPUs. Heurist’s team have built a variety of applications that allow users to harness the power of decentralized AI directly from their devices. The most popular dApp is the Imagine AI image generator. It allows users to create images with a text prompt describing the image contents. Users mainly come from web3 communities, and they typically create memes, original AI artwork, and fan art across gaming/anime/NFT projects.

The core service that Heurist provides for business customers is similar to HuggingFace Inference Endpoint or Replicate, where open-source developers plug into their AI inference API and leverage existing AI models. One of Heurist’s most notable use cases is from an NFT project called zkSamurist, which used Heurist’s services to build a collection of 500 unique samurai-style NFTs. Gateway recently wrote about its views on the decentralized AI space, and the importance of building the data backbone to ensure data privacy, user control, ownership, and facilitation of information across networks.

IP Issues in Outputs and Inputs

In the world of AI today, content can be generated such as text, images, and music. However legal and technical frameworks around who owns these AI-generated outputs are still being formulated. This is a major issue as the inability to enforce IP rights results in companies being able to retain a complete monopoly over generated content. This is why Heurist considers prompts to be amongst the most valuable assets to a user. As the quality of the prompts itself determines the quality of the generation’s output results. Users often take significant effort to refine and improve their prompts to ensure the best responses tailored to their needs. Just think about it, how long do we spend on ChatGPT just to be able to get an answer that aligns with our line of thinking. This is why users want to keep their inputs and outputs a “secret” from others. As they want to be able to participate in the sharing of such information with respective model trainers, fine-tuners, and applications.

Proving Ownership in AI Generation

As of now AI corporations are the one’s processing inputs used by an individual on top of closed source and proprietary technology. These inputs and the way the AI software processes information is not recorded, attributable, and currently falls within the domain of typical closed-SAAS models. While NFTs were promised to be a massive shift in digital rights management, they also fall short. Firstly, it requires users to hold a crypto wallet to prove their identity. Second, it requires custom programming and off-chain infrastructure which incurs significant developer/operational costs. Lastly, NFTs themselves only track provenance from the time of minting. Meaning if most of the compute process is done off-chain then there is no way to prove that the one who mints the NFT is in fact the one who “generated” the image.

Building an Audit Trail

Currently no audit trail exists which shows how generated AI content and its IP data is being used by model trainers, other inference networks, or applications. This is important because as of now once a user utilizes an AI service, that resulting data stays within the closed walls of the service. What if there was a way in which inference of AI models could prevent generating contents violating IP rights. This means that the user consents and a provable chain of permissions can be highlighted.

Why is Gateway Heurist’s choice to help solve this problem?

Private by Default Storage:
Gateway’s Encrypted Data Vaults (EDVs) ensure data inputted from Heurist’s applications and ecosystem is encrypted end-to-end. This ensures that both inference inputs and otuputs can be secured against unauthorized access while users retain control over access controls. This level of security is crucial for protecting the proprietary nature of AI inferences and the usage of such data. Also, this aligns well with the principles of trust and decentralization to ensure creators and users benefit the most.
Interoperability for Broader Building
Gateway’s protocol is designed to enable interoperability across networks, blockchains, and applications. This flexibility at the L1 level via smart contracts is important as other apps can easily request and consume user generated content and inferences.Smart contracts can include terms for usage rights, distribution permissions, and in the future royalty distributions. Gateway ensures that not only is data sharing simple, but that an auditable trail based on actions at the protocol level can easily be verified based on cryptographic signatures.
Public Verification of Origination
While data stored on Gateway’s EDVs are completely encrypted and stored on EDVs. Gateway generates timestamps based on user actions and application activity. As opposed to NFTs, Gateway creates a way for creators to establish a provable lineage of their work from the initial input to the final output of their AI generation. Ensuring the creation process is recorded and associated directly to an AI system, like Heurist.

Gateway is excited to have Heurist join us to drive the creation of an AI ecosystem that is user owned, protects IP rights, retains a public audit trail, and enables alignment of incentives from the data layer up! Founder and CEO of Heurist, JW, stated “Gateway's encrypted data vaults will help us protect IP rights and establish provable lineage for AI-generated content, which are critical challenges in the generative AI ecosystem today.” Gateway looks forward to enabling more AI use-cases and beyond with its testnet on the horizon. More details coming soon.

Try It Out: https://imagine.heurist.ai/