AI and Crypto Combine to Create Web3’s “Multiplayer Era”

Technology hype cycles that get people excited and worried are as expected as the changing seasons. This year the conversation revolves around artificial intelligence (AI).

OpenAI’s ChatGPT will either save the business world or automate it away. Stable Diffusion and Lensa apps are either going to destroy the art industry or open up a new world of creativity for newcomers with big ideas. Like all innovations, these tools will lead to as many questions and concerns as optimistic use cases.

This article is part of CoinDesk’s “Culture week.” Caitlin Burns is Director of Story at Palm NFT Studio.

Fortunately, another technological innovation, Web3, can drive AI in a more manageable and democratic direction. The difference could be seen by examining previous hype cycles around virtual and augmented reality (aka VR and AR), which required big budgets, big teams and bulky hardware.

Although there are major players in Web3, it is also a field for everyone to participate and influence. And at least for today, the same is true for AI. Together, these technologies have emerged to make technology more “multiplayer”. And especially, Web3 and AI are democratizing art, making it more accessible to more creators.

The next few years will be fascinating to watch as AI art apps battle artists in court over the source of the images their tools were “trained” on, and whether their tools make it easy to spam people or create malware (they do). The debate will continue. But for many creators, these tools have quickly become integrated into workflows. OpenAI went from zero to over one million users in less than five days.

There is a clear demand for tools that help people create written and visual content quickly. For creators who are good at ideas and prompts, but who are not skilled artists themselves, access to text-to-picture apps is particularly exciting. Being able to conceptualize your ideas can mean creating better pitches, working faster with creative teams. You can build projects faster and cheaper. And while the result of these images may not be perfect, it is good enough to convey an idea in a simple, visual format.

There are some really lovely pieces being built with AI art tools, despite it being early days for public use. The Bestiary Chronicles uses AI art to craft original human-written stories by Steve Coulson. An 11-year-old wrote a text-based video game in ChatGPT that went viral. MusicLM allows users to create music from text. It’s a never-ending “Seinfeld”-like show on Twitch. Finally, CatGPT will generate text based on human language prompts in cat. It may be a chatbot, but you are nothing in it zeitgeist until you are a cat meme.

The world will continue to refine, regulate, and determine long-term demand for these technologies’ capabilities, but they hold a promise: AI art tools allow creators to convey their ideas quickly and at lower costs than ever before.

While a solo creator can create a piece of art using AI art apps without collaborators, Web3 projects help people learn how to create stories and productions together in real time. Non-fungible token (NFT) collections like Broadside, DC Bat Cowls and DuskBreakers are built to bring audience members together through highly interactive features accessible through ownership. They are designed to create a community and allow that community to create together.

These generative storytelling NFT projects give each holder a character and the keys to shaping the story world. For some collections, such as the original Batman comic “Batman: The Legacy Cowl,” work is done in real-time by DC Comics artists, based on the voices of the community. Other projects like Broadside allow collectors to write and create their own stories in the world thanks to CC0 licenses.

Likewise, governance tools provide a framework for individuals to learn to co-create. DAOs rely on collective decision-making supported by Web3 technology to guide the growth of shared tools, resources, and environments. Although these common structures are also emerging and evolving along with regulatory precedents, it is clear that two major innovations are happening, and as they converge, very interesting things will come to life.

What we are beginning to see is the foundation of the multiplayer era of creativity:

As AI art tools show us how to communicate ideas quickly, Web3 tools help us create projects together in more equitable ways.

If you want to bring an idea to life, you can now create your first ideas quickly. If you want to start building a project for what you’ve created, take advantage of Web3 mechanics like tokenized ownership, generative storytelling, and governance.

As these technology categories grow together, the opportunities for shared creation are exciting. With more access, and more participation, what will future storytelling formats look like? As we begin to collaborate more deeply with code, we can also begin to collaborate more deeply with each other.