At just 23 years old, Jason Zhao landed his dream job as one of the youngest product managers at Google DeepMind. The political philosophy graduate spent his days immersed in AI research on his quest to build consumer products. 

While Zhao owned some crypto in high school, he didn’t get red pilled until around 2020 when he revisited the Bitcoin, Ethereum and Uniswap whitepapers. This was during a bull market, and he had an epiphany: the whitepapers mixed political philosophy with the feel of a political manifesto, with a sprinkling of computer science thrown in. Most technologies start as research projects or business investments, not as political manifestos. 

Zhao had explored bringing blockchain to DeepMind, but the idea was quickly dismissed. Rather than dissuading him, the realization that there’s no incentive for large companies like Google, Apple or Amazon to invest in blockchain excited Zhao. 

This led him to see only “blue sky when it came to product market fit” because all the use cases revolved around money. But at the same time, he wondered if blockchains could actually do anything beyond money. While at Google he’d seen firsthand the impending wave of AI and he sensed a “new Napster moment.”

Those were the seeds of what became Story Protocol, an open-source and peer-to-peer platform for intellectual property that Zhao co-founded. It allows creators, researchers, scientists and patent owners to register their work on-chain, ensuring they receive credit and compensation.

“There are three major computing paradigms in our lifetime. It’s AI, VR, and blockchain,” he said. “AI and VR are completely monopolized by existing incumbents, but blockchains are the only truly disruptive technology because they completely usurped the value capture mechanisms of these large companies.”

Using blockchain to protect IP from AI  

The company that developed Story, Programmable IP Labs, raised $80 million earlier this year in a round led by a16z. At issue is the ease with which artificial intelligence can create works of art or film or other media, which sometimes utilize previously-created works without compensating those owners. Story wants to tokenize and register IP so when it’s used the creator gets paid.  

“We’re creating a new asset class where you can have this sovereign intellectual property,” Zhao said. “You can program it based on the terms that you want to set, how others can use it, and then people can build a whole ecosystem of applications that leverage your IP to help you monetize it.”

An individual’s IP can include their name, image, and likeness as well as creative output like books, film, music or art. Control over that intellectual property has captured the cultural conversation as artists, actors and musicians are fighting to protect their IP from AI. In October, about 11,5000 artists, writers and musicians signed an open letter condemning the unlicensed use of their creative works to train AI systems. 

Zhao said one of Story’s core tenets is to unite code and law by turning law into code and vice versa. 

“We’ve created not just the technology and the layer one blockchain but also a set of legal contracts called the programmable IP license that maps one-to-one with the code,” he said. “If you change the smart contract state, you also change the legal state, and vice versa.” 

Protecting one’s creative work isn’t just about playing defense. It’s also about incentives and property rights. “IP is going to be the intellectual gold in the AI era,” Zhao said. “By bringing IP on-chain, by tokenizing it and making it programmable, we’re trying to address what is a Napster moment in AI to allow creators, scientists and brands to monetize their IP very seamlessly.”

Sistla Abishek, co-founder of OmniFlix Network, an interoperable peer-to-peer network for creators and communities, said AI and blockchain need each other.  

“In the age of AI, blockchain provides the provenance,” Abishek said, because AI often scrapes the web and social media for its output. “Adversarial effects” can come about if the two aren’t used in tandem, he said. 

The difficulty of making sure on-chain data is enforced in the real world is still a big problem, Abhishek said. 

“Whoever solves this is potentially representing the shovels and picks of the gold rush era. Here, using AI only accelerates the entire problem,” he said.