Consensus Toronto 2025 Coverage, CT2025, Feature Clara Tsao, founding officer of the Web3 storage pioneer, is a speaker with the AI Summit at Consensus 2025. 

Did AI write the sentence that you simply’re studying proper now? Did AI create the {photograph} you simply noticed on-line? Was the surprising, controversial story that tipped an election really actual, or AI-fueled misinformation?

These are questions Clara Tsao has wrestled with for years, starting from defending nationwide safety (the place she was the CTO of a workforce targeted on countering homegrown extremism) to creating a greater web, the place she’s co-founder of the Trust & Safety Professional Association. (She additionally someway finds time to be the President of the White House Presidential Innovation Fellows and function Senior Advisor at Tech Against Terrorism.)

“For me, it’s always been about, how do we bring more democracy to the web, because it’s an open network that everyone should have the fundamental human right to access,” says Tsao, a Founding Officer on the Filecoin Foundation, and who will seem onstage on the AI Summit at Consensus 2025.

Tsao is aware of that AI, in a way, is making all of those jobs tougher. So Filecoin is targeted on utilizing blockchain to make sure digital authenticity and sniff out fakes. “AI is going to turbocharge everything that we see today, for good and for bad,” says Tsao. “And at the end of the day, I think everybody wants to know if they’re talking to an AI or to a human.”

Interview has been condensed and frivolously edited for readability.

How has AI sophisticated the mission for an open and trusted web?

Clara Tsao: So one of many largest dangers with AI is, how can we inform if one thing is AI or bot-generated, versus one thing that we all know could be a human within the loop. And after I was engaged on matters like countering international affect operations, how do you show {that a} unhealthy actor really got here from a rustic that we all know could be attempting to intervene with us?

Can you give an instance?

There was a interval, I believe in 2016, when Facebook really took down a bunch of media channels that got here from Russia, as a result of it was linked to the Internet Research Agency, which is a gaggle that was undoubtedly attempting to push propaganda in the course of the election. So it’s about with the ability to show the supply of data, and ensuring that persons are not falling sufferer to misinformation.

And fakes are getting simpler and simpler to create, because of AI…

Right. And with AI-generated photographs and AI-generated information, it might be straightforward for the very unhealthy actors to make use of that know-how for evil.

Can you join the dots of how blockchain helps crack this downside?

One factor that’s nice about decentralized applied sciences — and decentralized storage particularly — is you possibly can really show how information is modified over the course of time, as a result of we retailer every bit of information by hash, not by location.

So let’s say we now have an information set, and we’re nervous that possibly the information is being manipulated. Maybe a authorities is coming in and altering one thing in order that it might probably match their political agenda. There are many explanation why preserving info is extra essential than ever, and that is one thing that we will completely do with Filecoin.

Who are you working with particularly?

We’ve labored with tons of wonderful nonprofits over time, like MuckRock, to verify we can’t solely archive and protect crucial info, but in addition ensure it is tamper-proof, ensure it is resilient. For instance, if it is info that journalists pull from, that we will have resilient copies of all of it world wide. We may use that very same know-how to essentially show that this journalist took a sure picture.

In sure elections, there could be disinformation about whether or not one thing really occurred or not, and you’ll have photographers use decentralized applied sciences. And we now have a ton of functions of corporations constructing on high of Filecoin as we speak, that assist confirm this picture was taken from this gadget at this level of time.

That’s actually highly effective by way of not simply day-to-day journalism, but in addition in with the ability to be admissible in courts. In Ukraine, there could be warfare images that could be taken out of context. And we’re in a position to protect a variety of key pictures that may in the future be admissible in worldwide prison courts for human rights conditions.

How are you now excited about Filecoin’s mission?

We may also help confirm for those who’re speaking to AI or a human. We may also help retailer information at a fraction of the fee. We can ensure that information is extra correct, as a result of most AI data-sets are constructed off coaching tons of information. And storing information could be very costly. So our objective is to make storing information reasonably priced for everybody, and ensuring that persons are additionally pulling from as a lot information as attainable, so AI brokers aren’t solely skilled from a subset.

And lastly, we will have a spot the place it isn’t simply monopolies with the ability to entry tons of information. People can have a selection on the place to retailer it, find out how to retailer it. So they’re not locked right into a walled backyard the place they will by no means get out.

Love it. Thanks Clara. See you in Toronto at Consensus!

Jeff Wilser will host the AI Summit at Consensus 2025, and is host of The People’s AI: The Decentralized AI Podcast.

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