Atari Crushes ChatGPT: A Chess Lesson for the Future of AI Royalties

Okay, let's be honest. Who honestly thought ChatGPT was going to beat a 1977 Atari 2600 at chess? As funny as the simple fact that it even happened is, though, it’s profoundly, instructively deeply hilarious. It does provide a compelling, if unintentional, analogy to the situation we’re encountering with NFT royalties. Just follow along, and you’ll quickly understand why I say that.

Chess Rules Reflect Royalty Contracts

Think about the Atari chess engine. It's simple. Brutally simple. Its processor was glacial, its memory sparse to the point of erasure, and its tactics, even generously stated, laughably basic. It understood the rules. It understood the way the pawns and bishops and kings and queens could move, and what a checkmate looked like. It was real and it executed those rules impeccably, operating within its limitations.

Now, imagine smart contracts that were specifically created to enforce NFT creator royalties. In practice, they are not as clear, nor should they be deterministic. You mint an NFT and set a royalty rate of your choice. The contract then automatically distributes you, the creator, a cut of every future sale, making sure you get paid. Like that downed Atari, the contract understands how to play the game.

Here's the rub: while the Atari played by its own limited rules, the NFT space doesn't always play by any rules. Or, more precisely, it seeks loopholes and workarounds to get around them.

ChatGPT's Failure: Royalty Circumvention

ChatGPT is said to have over 175 billion parameters and can generate anything from poetry to computer code. It should have handily outpaced the Atari. But it didn't. It got confused. It misidentified pieces. It even tried restarting the game! Why? Because it struggled with the fundamentals of the game: spatial awareness and raw gameplay rules.

This, my NFT-polyamorous friends, is precisely what’s happening with NFT royalties. We understand that the current NFT landscape can be confusing and intimidating. With its myriad of marketplaces, various smart contract standards, and immense transaction volume across the ecosystem, that experience is akin to what legacy ChatGPT experienced. This has inadvertently established a paradigm where platforms and art collectors can go to great lengths to avoid paying royalties.

For example, they use technical limitations against other players and take advantage of loopholes in smart contract code. Some even move their trading volume to places that don’t pay royalties. It's like ChatGPT deciding that pawns can move diagonally sometimes, or that checkmate doesn't really count if you squint hard enough.

This is not a mere technical issue, but one of ethics. We’re making a big deal about creators losing their money that they are entitled to. And when creators aren’t getting good value for their work, they make less work, or none at all. This is detrimental to the creative sector and curtails innovation, reducing the overall value of the NFT space. It further erodes the promise of a more equitable digital economy. It's outrageous.

Simple Rules: Restore Royalty Integrity

So, what's the solution? Ironically, it’s to borrow a page from Atari’s own playbook. We should make the royalty enforcement mechanism less burdensome. We clearly need more transparent, less easily circumvented smart contracts.

We need smart contracts that are like the Atari's chess engine: limited in scope, perhaps, but unwavering in their commitment to enforcing the core rules. This isn’t an effort to stifle innovation, it’s an effort to make deployments fair and sustainable. It’s about the future we want to create—a future where creators can once again be rewarded for their work.

• Standardized Royalty Contracts: A universal, easily auditable smart contract standard for royalties across all platforms.
• On-Chain Enforcement: Moving royalty enforcement directly onto the blockchain, minimizing the ability for off-chain manipulation.
• Community Governance: Empowering creators and collectors to collectively define and enforce royalty standards.

The Atari’s unexpected win against ChatGPT wasn’t a cute or amusing story. It was a wake-up call. It’s a reminder that, in the end, the easiest solutions are often the best. In the complex world of NFTs, a little bit of Atari-style simplicity might be exactly what we need to restore integrity and ensure a brighter future for digital creators.

Let’s make the NFT space fairer, more transparent, and more like the Atari: simple, reliable, and actually works as intended. Your financial literacy and digital creators’ livelihoods are counting on it.

Let’s make the NFT space fairer, more transparent, and more like the Atari: simple, reliable, and actually works as intended. Your financial literacy and support for digital creators depends on it.