# Blockchain-Empowered Lifecycle Management for AI-Generated Content (AIGC) Products in Edge Networks

**Authors:** Yinqiu Liu, Hongyang Du, Dusit Niyato, Jiawen Kang, Zehui Xiong, Chunyan Miao,  Xuemin,  Shen, Abbas Jamalipour  
**arXiv:** [2303.02836](https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.02836)  
**Date:** 2023-03-06  
**Summary page:** https://www.summarizepaper.com/en/paper/2303.02836v1/

## Key points

- Rapid development of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) brings challenges: service latency, security, and trustworthiness
- Edge AIGC paradigm proposed to optimize service latency by distributing AIGC services to edge devices
- Challenges include tampering, plagiarism, lack of trustworthiness in open networks hindering circulation of AIGC products
- Blockchain-empowered framework introduced for managing lifecycle of edge AIGC products
- Protecting ownership and copyright of AIGC
- Ensuring legitimate and timely exchanges of funds-AIGC ownership among anonymous users
- Establishing a reputation scheme for determining trustworthy edge service providers (ESPs)
- Reputation scheme considers local opinions from producers and recommended opinions from other producers to quantify ESP trustworthiness
- Numerical results show superiority of proposed approach in reputation trends among ESPs and total number of assigned tasks
- Framework incorporates on-chain mechanisms: Proof-of-AIGC, incentive mechanism based on HTL, reputation-based ESP selection mechanism
- Comprehensive solution for managing lifecycle of edge AIGC products addressing challenges related to service latency, security, trustworthiness, and copyright protection

## Summary

The rapid development of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) has brought about various challenges, including service latency, security and trustworthiness. To address these challenges, researchers have proposed the edge AIGC paradigm which distributes AIGC services to edge devices to optimize service latency. However, AIGC products are still vulnerable to tampering and plagiarism as well as the lack of trustworthiness in open networks hindering the free circulation of AIGC products. In this article, a blockchain-empowered framework is introduced for managing the lifecycle of edge AIGC products. The framework includes several components and mechanisms aimed at protecting ownership and copyright of AIGC, ensuring legitimate and timely exchanges of funds-AIGC ownership among anonymous users and establishing a reputation scheme for determining trustworthy and reliable edge service providers. The reputation scheme takes into account both local opinions generated by producers based on their interactions with edge service providers (ESPs) and recommended opinions received from other producers. The overall opinion is calculated by averaging all received recommended opinions with weights assigned based on familiarity between producers and ESPs as well as the value of previous interactions. This reputation calculation process helps quantify the trustworthiness of ESPs enabling producers to easily determine which ESP is more reliable. Numerical results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach in terms of reputation trends among different ESPs and total number of assigned tasks. The reputation scheme successfully achieves its design goals by quantifying ESP trustworthiness, alleviating potential service congestion caused by relying solely on familiar ESPs and encouraging high-quality AIGC services from ESPs. Furthermore, the framework incorporates three on-chain mechanisms: Proof-of-AIGC for defending against plagiarization; an incentive mechanism based on HTL to protect funds-AIGC ownership exchange; and a reputation-based ESP selection mechanism for effective scheduling of AIGC generation services. Overall, this blockchain-empowered framework provides a comprehensive solution for managing the lifecycle of edge AIGC products addressing challenges related to service latency, security trustworthiness and copyright protection. The framework's components and mechanisms work together to ensure the integrity and reliability of AIGC services in open networks.