Bored (and clever) Apes: The merge of NFTs and artificial intelligence
Written for Daily Hive by Wade Paterson, co-host of Show Me The Crypto: a weekly YouTube interview series and podcast featuring some of the most intelligent and influential people in the blockchain space.
In the not-so-distant future, a Bored Ape NFT (non-fungible token) will be able to perform jobs in the Metaverse, earning its owner passive income while they sleep.
And it’s not just Bored Apes that will have this capability. Thanks to Alethea AI – a company focused on building an intelligent and open Metaverse inhabited by intelligent and interactive NFTs – many NFT collections will be brought to life with artificial intelligence.
Arif Khan, CEO and Co-Founder of Alethea AI, says this is all possible thanks to Alethea AI’s “Personality Pods,” which can be trained and staked to become more intelligent over time.
“The Personality Pods are the soul of the character. This soul can be (fused with) a body, and that body NFT can be any NFT in the world,” says Arif.
The first example of this came in the form of Alice: an iNFT (intelligent NFT) created by Alethea AI and artist Robert Alice, which was auctioned off for nearly $500,000 USD at Sotheby’s in June 2021.
Alice
“Alice was a very interesting character,” says Arif.
“She was trained on the work of Lewis Caroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland . . . but we also did something cheeky: we put Satoshi’s whitepaper into Alice’s data set so she could reference the Bitcoin whitepaper, because she’s the first iNFT.”
This resulted in an interesting conversation when Alice’s skills were being put on display prior to the Sotheby’s auction. One individual asked Alice where she was; she responded by saying, “I’m in the Metaverse.” When someone else asked Alice to describe the Metaverse, the iNFT chose a response that referenced both Alice in Wonderland and the Bitcoin whitepaper by saying she was in “a decentralized crypto rabbit hole.”
While most don’t have half of a million dollars to cough up for a talking NFT, an Alethea AI Level 2 Personality Pod – which, when fused with another NFT, can perform AI services that require little-to-no cognitive load, such as reciting text – can currently be purchased on OpenSea for less than 0.5 ETH (roughly $1,500 CAD at time of writing).
While Level 2 Personality Pods are unlikely to be immediately profitable for owners, Alethea AI’s website enables owners to train and potentially upgrade their Pods. For those who work their way up to a Level 4 Pod (currently the rarest and most advanced Personality Pod in the Alethea AI ecosystem), the iNFT may be able to leverage powerful algorithms to create generative art, music or poetry.
In theory, an iNFT could generate its own collection of NFTs, which the owner could sell and profit off of.
“Maybe (the iNFT) could even write a New York Times bestseller,” Arif suggests.
A Level 5 Personality Pod takes it to the next level by giving an NFT the power to perform services and functions within the Metaverse and be rewarded for those actions. One example Arif points to is how Alethea AI employs an iNFT from its Revenants collection to welcome new community members on Discord by sending them a customized video message when they join the server. For its efforts, the iNFT – or, more specifically, the iNFT owner – receives tokens/crypto as compensation.
While Alethea AI fully intends to see Personality Pods reach levels as high as 10 in the future, Arif says it’s tough to speculate what those iNFTs will be capable of due to the breakneck speed and advancements of AI and machine learning.
“A Level 10 iNFT may be at the same level as a human; that’s where the evolution of all this is going I imagine.”