“While these uses of GenAI are often neither overtly malicious nor explicitly violate these tools’ content policies or terms of services, their potential for harm is significant.”
Mid journey and the like have already been caught creating shutterstock watermarks in images. Future models might be able to fake specific watermarks well.
Not like that. A server name that can be authenticated. Like when you receive an email from your bank (in the metadata), you know it's legitimate. Each organization can set up their own server to host things they vouch for. With ActivityPub it can be viewed elsewhere with the guarantee that it's from a trusted source.
Sure, but so do a lot of other things that aren't as costly. If NFTs were the first secure way to authenticate things online we wouldn't have had online banking until very recently
True but trust is hard to establish in decentralized platforms like the fediverse. As far as I’m aware the only decentralized banking is unfortunately cryptocurrency.
What NFTs (and crypto in general) do is very different from a web of trust style approach
Crypto creates one source of absolute truth, the Blockchain, costly computed via consensus.
Web of trust, on the other hand, requires you to declare which accounts you trust. Via public-private key signing, you can always verify that a post is actually made by a specific person, and if you trust that person (e.g. because you've met them before and exchanged keys), you know it's legit. You can then extend that system by also trusting accounts your trusted accounts verified, etc