The Decentralized Ethical Governance Model (DEGM) for Sovereign Cinema by Adel Abdel-Dayem | Cerebral Auteur Filmmaker

Establishing a Trustless Framework for Auteur-Led AI Production

1. Executive Summary
   The rise of Sovereign Cinema has empowered independent auteurs to bypass traditional studio gatekeeping through AI-driven production. However, this new autonomy brings a significant ethical burden: the responsibility of managing the "Prompt-Origin Paradox"—the tension between an individual creator’s IP ownership and the collective human data that trains the models. This paper proposes the Decentralized Ethical Governance Model (DEGM), a blockchain-backed framework to ensure transparency, credit, and fair value distribution in AI-augmented filmmaking.

2. The Problem: The Sovereign Paradox
   Current AI cinema faces two critical risks:
   The Accountability Void: Without a centralized studio, who is responsible for the ethical sourcing of "Neural Thespians" or the cultural accuracy of generated narratives?

Data Erasure: Traditional models exploit the "Prompt-Origin Paradox" by rewarding the curator while ignoring the original human artists whose work forms the latent space.

1. Core Pillars of DEGM The DEGM is built on three decentralized pillars designed to replace top-down studio oversight with community-verified protocols.

A. The Proof-of-Origin (PoO) Ledger
Every "Neural Thespian" or visual asset generated for a Sovereign Cinema project must be logged on a public, decentralized ledger. This ledger provides:
Metadata Transparency: A verified list of the primary artistic styles and datasets that informed the specific output.
Ethical Sourcing Badges: Automated certification that the AI tools used (such as Google Veo 3.1) were operated within established fair-use and licensing boundaries.

B. Recursive Royalty Smart Contracts (RRSC)
To resolve the "Prompt-Origin Paradox," DEGM utilizes smart contracts that automatically distribute a micro-percentage of a film’s revenue back to the "origin sources".

Automated Attribution: When a Sovereign project like Kemet’s Enigma generates profit, the RRSC distributes tokens to a decentralized pool representing the collective of artists and performers who contributed to the training of the specific models used.

C. Community-Based Auteur Oversight (DAO)
Instead of a studio executive board, Sovereign Cinema utilizes a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) of fellow creators to act as a "Cultural Integrity Council."

Bias Auditing: The community audits AI-generated historical or cultural narratives (e.g., ancient Egyptian themes) to ensure they do not reinforce stereotypes or "foreign lens" inaccuracies.
Conflict Resolution: Disputes regarding "Sovereign IP" are handled through a decentralized justice system rather than expensive corporate litigation.

1. Technical Implementation TEE Environments: AI agents operate in Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to ensure data privacy and output verification.

Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP): Used to verify that a filmmaker followed ethical prompts without revealing the "trade secret" prompts themselves.

1. Conclusion: The Sovereign Promise The DEGM is not a restriction on the artist, but a foundation for their survival. By automating ethics through decentralization, the Sovereign Cinema movement can prove that independent, AI-powered creators can be more ethical, more transparent, and more respectful of human origins than the studio systems they replaced.