To Prevent the Coming “Ultraviolet Catastrophe” of AI Deepfakes, We’ll Need to Move Our Social Networks to Nostr

Nostr is a new-ish social network project and if I’m being honest, I haven’t thought about it much at all except vaguely as that obscure thing Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is backing. But when Philip Rosedale was telling me about FairShare, he mentioned Nostr as “[the other] thing I’m most excited about right now as a concept and also as a code base.”

Philip being Philip, his interest isn’t exactly about Nostr becoming an alternative to Facebook or whatever, but being a solution to a completely different but equally concerning problem in technology: The growing power of AI programs to spoof or deep fake real people.

“I think that stuff is going to become an ultraviolet catastrophe in the next year,” he tells me. “Maybe less than a year because of the AIs.”

You’ve probably seen audio recordings like this, where a deep fake is able to imitate Obama and other public figures. That’s all fun and games at the moment, but what happens when that same technology is used to initiate a good friend of yours — and then that “friend” calls you up, telling you they’re stranded in a foreign country, and they need you to wire them $2500?

“I think one of the things that’s going to happen with AI is that all our messages are gonna become [spoofable by AI deep fakes]– we can’t trust them anymore,” as Philip Rosedale puts it.

“I think that we are about to enter into, in some ways, actually a very good time, where all the messages on the public Internet are just presumably bullshit; they’re more likely to be garbage than not. And so everybody’s just gonna have to stop [using existing social media] and use signed messages.

“I think we’re gonna have to move to a new system. And that’s going to be really disruptive. But I think it’s kinda good because we’ll get less nonsense messages.”

That said, here’s an introduction to Nostr from Philip, and why he believes it’s also better than blockchain:

“Nostr is a crypto primitive, so it’s extremely simple… It’s a signed message relay. And you run the relay, and the relay is kind of a neutral, encrypted place where you just send messages, so it’s kind of like a router. You basically just send a message there and anybody else can look for messages that have a certain key on them. 

“And so, what it turns out is you can use Nostr very easily — like very, very easily — to replace Signal, Twitter, Snap Maps, Grinder, all of these different things can be implemented overnight, using Nostr. And it makes all of those things very, very private, and very, very easy to do. 

“And so we don’t need a company like Signal — to the extent that it’s a company — you don’t need a benevolent platform to run a relay. It’s super simple to just run one on Nostr. And there’s already thousands of these Nostr relays. All the relays kind of copy their messages to each other.

“So basically Nostr is like a version of a blockchain that doesn’t have a blockchain. It’s just a free server that people run. That server provides aggregate signed, transmitted messages.” 

Funnily enough, the main people who seem interested in Nostr are from the blockchain/crypto world. But Philip believes Nostr pretty much obviates that whole project. 

As he put it, as if he were talking with web3 fans:

“Hey, everybody, why don’t we just use the simpler thing? We don’t need money, we don’t have to fight about who gets the next dollar.”

Because yes, that’s ultimately how Bitcoin and Ethereum operate:

“All the blockchain stuff is basically a system that lets you do some stuff, but also primarily allows people to gamble and fight over who gets the next dollar printed. It was such a bad idea I don’t even know where to start.”

More on Nostr here. We are starting to see some consumer apps that run on Nostr, such as Damus, a mobile social app, but so far it’s fairly niche. 

As with many projects Philip Rosedale is interested in (ahem), Nostr may be too ahead of its time to gain real traction any time soon. Existing social networks are so deeply ingrained in our daily Internet lives, it will be very difficult to shift away from them.

But then again, seeing how Jack Dorsey’s replacement at Twitter has helped make that social network pretty problematic, there’s a growing need for a successor. And we are one major life-threatening disaster away from AI deep fakes becoming a global crisis.