Blockchain-Empowered Lifecycle Management for AI-Generated Content Products in Edge Networks

The rapid development of Artificial Intelligence-Generated Content (AIGC) has brought daunting challenges in the areas of service latency, security, and trustworthiness. Recently researchers have presented the edge AIGC paradigm, effectively optimizing the service latency by distributing AIGC services to edge devices. However, AIGC products are still unprotected and vulnerable to tampering and plagiarization. Moreover, as a kind of online non-fungible digital property, the free circulation of AIGC products is hindered by the lack of trustworthiness in open networks. For the first time, in this article, we present a blockchain-empowered framework to manage the lifecycle of edge AIGC products. Specifically, leveraging fraud proofability, we first propose a protocol to protect the ownership and copyright of AIGC, called Proof-of-AIGC. Then, we design an incentive mechanism to guarantee the legitimate and timely execution of the funds-AIGC ownership exchanges among anonymous users. Furthermore, we implement a multi-weight subjective logic-based reputation scheme with which AIGC producers can determine which edge service provider is trustworthy and can reliably handle their services. Through the use of test data, we demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach. Last but not least, we discuss important open directions for further research.