Fakery Resistant Books
Original post by FeedbackMotor5498 on 2023-05-28.
So I'm smoking herb, and was just thinking about the capabilities of chatGPT LLM's and eventually AGI's ability to possibly alter online content to alter the past, with algorithms controlling the present, thus the future somewhat orwellian style. Even though books are printed by multinational corporations and push agendas, at least it's fixed on paper. It can't be modified once printed, where documents could be swiftly changed en mass with AI, with the algorithms pointing us to the altered reality. Having textbooks would be essential to humanity if an AI took over or was used in malicious ways. Maybe I'm just stoned, and thought?
I had similar thoughts years ago seeing it was only a matter of time before techniques for digitally faking photographs were applied to digitally faking documents. I was transcribing a textbook called Thermodynamics and Chemistry and wanted to use FOSS principles to not only keep the textbook open for others to adapt, but also to help a reader prove digital provenance (preventing rewriting of its change log).
Here are the tools I used:
Version control: Git for communicating version history of TeXmacs source code with OpenPGP and OpenTimestamps data.
Authentication: OpenPGP digital signatures to allow people to securely communicate which version of a digital book they trust.
Precedence: OpenTimestamps to immutably and trustlessly date the oldest version of a book.
Editability: TeXmacs to allow anyone to update and compile their own textbook from source code into formats such as PDF. (e.g. the Thermodynamics and Chemistry textbook I transcribed)
Legal: Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0) to irrevocably allow others to remix, adapt, and update the book for future generations. For comparison, Wikipedia uses CC BY-SA 3.0 as its default.
A high quality digital textbook should be compatible with these tools in order to allow a reader to verify its provenance.
Physical textbooks, by their nature, have much higher storage requirements of volume and weight. An academic can use various forensic techniques and simple dogged note keeping to track a physical bookʼs history, especially if it is one of notable historic significance (e.g Shakespeareʼs First Folios). Tracking of physical books is somewhat scalable through libraries, the labor of dedicated librarians, and a host civilization that can afford to maintain fire departments and library institutions themselves.
So, in summary, I agree that physical books are naturally resistant to fakery since their physical nature already incurs a significant amount of maintenance costs which can be ameliorated with libraries and librarians. However, digital textbooks can be made resistant to fakery through the application of version control and digital signature software.