a bold new techart project that combines AI and NFT activism

As the NFT and crypto space grows, so does the scope of projects that fit within the framework. A particularly bold addition is RadBots, an NFT collection of sensationally lifelike conversational videobots created by leading playwrights, artists and screenwriters from India, Sri Lanka, UK and Germany. The RadBots the project was carried out by Dara.network, which is a community-driven chat app – similar to Discord and LinkedIn – that caters to the creative, cultural and change-making sectors. RadBots intends to give an interactive voice to characters from traditionally underrepresented communities. They promote much-needed visibility within the tech sector, which has hitherto been straight male dominated. Take for example diode, the chatty male sex worker, who caters to the community of men looking for men. Or Afro Hudgi, an immigrant, student and feminist living in Bangalore, looking to form friendships and human connection. It is even Hukam Singh, which evokes the spirit of a long-forgotten parliamentarian, committed to defending fundamental rights within the Indian Constitution. When Hukam is asked, “What is the strongest thing about the Indian Constitution?”, the videobot replies, “Well, it has to be the core of the Constitution. That’s the preamble. It contains a very strong message about the promise of the Constitution. And for once it treats all citizens equally. It speaks of a desire for the nation to create a fair and just society, where all its citizens enjoy freedom and equality, and other values ​​enshrined in the Constitution.” Hukam goes on to articulate his skepticism regarding the Constitution of India’s commitment to promote this equality at the birth of the nation, but also mentions that the Preamble has remained a beacon for him. The bot’s measured perception of critical issues comes from the sophisticated technology at its heart RadBots project: as Dara’s technical founder, Dev Aggarwal, explains, Radbots was created by merging authored short scripts, user questions, and OpenAI’s artificial intelligence platform, GPT-3. GPT-3 is the largest commercially available AI model, which uses a neural network of 175 billion parameters to generate text that is almost indistinguishable from the writing of real people.

The effect is funny, at times eerily human and varied. Some of RadBots are far more abstract, and yet just as articulate and nuanced. Consider Enti-I, which is a highly organized undersea swarm intelligence, committed to stimulating intelligent climate action. It is just as fleeting b9, which channels every fetus that falls in time. And so it is NFTBot, which was created to be an interactive personification of one of the first (and most expensive) collections of NFTs, CryptoPunks. NFTBot has surprisingly nuanced ideas around the topics of crypto and NFTs; when Dara’s founder-COO Archana Prasad asks her, “What is your advice to artists making NFTs?” Boten responds: “If cryptoculture really wants to save the planet, we need to create new models of ownership and value, which are in line with the real cost of living. With the right mindset, we can collaborate and build new technologies, to form new communities and create new values. We can do this together.”

Dara’s team sought to make it possible for anyone to send text or a recorded video message to RadBots and then quickly receive a video reply. To manifest this, the text of incoming videos is transcribed through Google’s speech-to-text API. These incoming texts from the questioner are then added to the particular bot’s author script, from where they go to OpenAI’s GPT-3. The AI ​​system is in effect trying to predict what the author would write if they continued the script, and the generated RadBot text response to the incoming question is thus extracted. The text response is then converted to speech through Google’s text-to-speech API, and the result is lip-synced or “DeepFaked” to the Bot’s face as a video clip, and finally sent back to the questioner’s phone.

“We also built RadBots in response to the pandemic,” explains Dara’s CEO, Sean Blagsvedt. “Many of my friends in the performing arts simply couldn’t work, and we wondered if RadBots could enable not only new forms of interactive fiction, but also provide new livelihood streams for people who work with words.” Therefore, RadBots are also available for purchase as NFTs with 50 percent of the proceeds from their sale going back to the author who created the character and script sold. Another 30 percent of the revenue goes to the RadBot DAO or Decentralized Autonomous Organization, known as RADAO. A DAO is an organizational framework that reimagines human collaboration by using digital code to create preconfigured parameters of participation and association, which cannot be changed. RADAO is committed to RadBots’ NFT continues to fund further socially conscious techart experiments and the upliftment of underrepresented communities that RadBots try to speak for. RADAO’s membership list will include RadBot artists, NFT buyers and RadBots themselves – an unprecedented level of belief in the power of AI and tech to promote plus-sum solutions and compassionate thinking.

Discussing the current phase of the project, Blagsvedt tells STIR, “We want RadBots to be as green as possible, which is why we release them in batches on the Tezos network, a greener “proof of stake” crypto network versus “proof of work” networks like Etherium and Bitcoin. The proof of stake consensus mechanism cuts down on the energy consumption required to keep a blockchain technology like Tezos up and running, saving huge amounts of energy. Hailing from backgrounds that intersect design, visual art, software policy and more, Prasad and Blagsvedt started Dara with the goal of connecting folx across creative, cultural and change-making sectors to facilitate forward-thinking, environmentally conscious techart projects. The RadBots the project and the larger Dara network have managed to bring together a geographically dispersed group of creatives who have married cutting-edge technology with NFT activism. It’s a far cry from the speculation, opportunism and pop culture obsession our new and shared crypto-paradigm gets so much flak for. While it remains to be seen where Dara’s work will go in the future, one thing is certain: RadBots the project signals new and exciting things on the horizon for techart.

Partners:

Dara undertook RadBots in collaboration with BeFantastic and the Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai, the former of which is a techart organization and festival that brings together architects, artists, technologists and designers to pursue creative technology, which is intended to contribute to a positive, sustainable future. The Goethe Institute promotes knowledge of the German language and history, and also engages in cross-cultural collaboration between creatives across fields and disciplines.