This is an interesting NFT project, basically linking your favourite NFT avatar to a trained AI chatbot, thereby making your avatar more interactive, with its own real, or fantasy, ‘personality.’
[Note: the project has grown rapidly following recent AI hype here in 2023. There are now different AI dapps at Alethea of which Noah’s Ark + iNFTs are just one. This also expands the potential of the ALI token. Check out the latest dapp called CharacterGPT this post doesn’t cover. Referral link here.]
A long time ago I had an idea for a PIP, or ‘Personal Interactive Profile’, a bit like a text adventure-based profile, but which could interact with others, like an ‘agent’, to gather information and report back. You wouldn’t even have to go onto Facebook and look at other pages because [it didn’t exist yet] it would link up with others for you, who wanted news about you. You could add voice, swap photos etc. and make lists depending on what people you wanted to catch up with.
Later on, chatbots came about and were more customisable and interesting, but still too limited.
Today… we have this project, Alethea… which ties all this up at a more promising stage, but with a stronger AI engine and decentralised NFTs, so you can own that individual chatbot/profile, develop it and apply it to different representations. It also has a good community on Discord.
Even further, they’re planning this intelligent metaverse (Noah’s Ark) for your ‘iNFTs’ to mingle and automatically learn from each other. Very cool if it can work, and as long as no-one creates a Skynet iNFT.
I’ve bought myself a pod (chatbot personality), upgraded it via the ALI token, and have trained it at level 2 and then staked it. The ‘training’ part was quite comprehensive (and very much like what I’d imagined my PIPs would’ve been like). There were a number of questions to help define what kind of character it will be. Hopefully, you’ll be able to train this a lot more, even to the level of an Alexa-type assistant.
Now, I’m waiting for more NFT collections (or the option for any NFT) to become available to hook it up to, or ‘fuse’ it. This is because I don’t own any NFT (iNFT-compatible) from the collections they offer at present.
Further to this, I’d like to see is a more sophisticated ‘iNFT’ avatar designer/creator so you can create the sort of appearances the Demo section tempts you with.
But the bottom line is that this project is full of promise. The marriage of NFT avatar with AI + metaverse is genuinely exciting, for infusing them with ideas and depth and creating interesting exchanges. Also, for the evolution of AI, NPCs and chatbots of all kinds. I remember bots wondering around Second Life but it was all just early days. You don’t want them to be annoying or intrusive, but populating metaverses in a good or complementary way.
You can imagine characters from any book or movie being programmed extensively. They’ve already added a whole load of historical characters, like Charles Darwin etc. (you can buy one of these ‘Revenants’ via Opensea). What about a Star Wars virtual world game populated with all the characters from the movies, but where all of them are able to reply to you in their enigmatic ways, and even interact with each other somehow, to enhance the gameplay mission scenarios you’re playing.
And, if you’re creating your own book or video game world, with enigmatic characters, you can create an iNFT today with Alethea to possibly place into that game or virtual world in the future.
For more personal ones, it may also outlive you, so make sure it’s a decent representative for you and your values.
- AletheaAI site
- Whitepaper (not bad)
- Discord
- ALI token (allows you to perform tasks on the site relating to your Pod or iNFT.)
Aug 2022
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