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Alethea AI has teamed up with blockchain company Polygon to bring the power of generative AI to AI character non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
The deal will allow millions of artificially intelligent collectibles to be easily minted on Polygon, a Layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum.
Alethea AI and Polygon are in the process of creating one AI Collectibles campaign, which allows anyone to quickly create, train, and trade AI characters as NFTs on Polygon. Alethea AI received development funds from Polygon to carry out the AI character project.
“Since we last spoke, the only thing that’s different now is that the character’s body is generated based on the user’s prompt,” Alethea AI CEO Arif Khan said in an interview with GamesBeat . “And the personality is also generated by the prompt. So it’s like a full character creator just from the prompt. Previously, the users created the personality, named it, gave it habits, this and that. So now the user enters police officer and it generates everything.
The AI characters are generated using Alethea AI’s recently launched Generative AI System CharacterGPT, a multimodal text-to-character system that goes beyond traditional text-to-image engines such as Open AI’s Dall-E 2 or Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion- fashion model. Alethea AI has been working on the AI technology for almost four years.
CharacterGPT allows users to generate fully interactive and intelligent AI characters with a one-line prompt in natural language. Users can generate free AI characters on the AI protocol’s recently launched dApp mycharacter.ai and then save them as NFTs on Polygon. It generates both the images and the ‘personality’.
To demonstrate this, a unique AI collectible from Sandeep Nailwal, the co-founder of Polygon, is now live on the dApp mycharacter.ai, as a tokenized Digital Twin. Sandeep’s AI Collectible is modeled after his writings, public statements and interviews.
It can simultaneously inform millions of users about the benefits of using Polygon’s blockchain ecosystem and share anecdotal wisdom about Nailwal’s entrepreneurial journey. As more users interact with Nailwal’s Digital Twin, the underlying AI becomes increasingly intelligent over time, Khan said.
Nailwal said in a statement: “Generative AI is advancing rapidly and has the potential to have a major impact on our lives in the years to come. I’ve seen firsthand how Alethea AI has developed this technology over the past few years, and through their CharacterGPT AI engine, users can create interactive characters in seconds. We are excited to continue to support Alethea as it builds on Polygon and bring the power and potential of generative AI to our thriving ecosystem.”
Nailwal’s tokenized AI Collectible comes with an on-chain and verified proof of ownership, shown as a gold check mark on the dApp interface, which is intended to show that his AI-generated likeness and intelligence was generated with his permission.
The AI Collectible resides in Nailwal’s Web3 Wallet on Polygon, which he owns and manages. Given the legitimate criticism generative AI companies receive for training their models on data sets without the explicit consent of the users, Sandeep Nailwal’s verified Digital Twin is the first of its kind launched by Alethea AI and its partners on the AI Protocol: A proprietary and proprietary layer for generative AI now live on Polygon.
Ahmad Matyana, chief operating officer of Alethea AI, said in a statement: “Generative AI needs a backbone of digital property rights to allow users not only to bring their imaginations to life, but also to own their creations. With CharacterGPT, users can now create interactive, intelligent characters that can serve as their AI companions, digital guides, or as NPCs in games. By launching on Polygon, we are now enabling these users to not only create characters to train AI engines, but to own them as AI Collectibles in their wallets. We believe a multi-modal system like CharacterGPT will usher in a Cambrian explosion in character and IP creation, supported by a decentralized model of ownership and governance.”
Every AI character generated on CharacterGPT is fully compatible with the recently implemented AI protocol smart contracts on Polygon. Alethea AI believes the AI protocol will serve as the underlying connective tissue that will enable NFTs to “come alive” as interactive media assets, with on-chain personality traits, interoperability between different dApps, powerful generative capabilities, and in the case of Digital Twins: on-chain verification of consent.
The type of AI collectibles that can be generated on Polygon using Alethea AI’s CharacterGPT AI system is unlimited, Khan said. Celebrities can choose to create their own allowed digital twins to interact with their fans in a scalable way, IP owners can create licensed interactive characters to serve as digital companions for their fans, users can use Siri-like or Alexa-like creating assistants that can be deployed in their homes, museums and cultural institutions can bring historical figures to life to interact with their visitors in real time, and metaverses and game environments can quickly deploy engaging NPCs to interact and quest with their users, enabling engagement and retention in their gaming environments.
Alethea AI is headquartered in Singapore, but most of its 70 people are scattered around the world. The company has raised $32 million to date.
Khan said Alethea AI has already trained its large language model with users through crowdsourced training the company did last year with its community and OpenAI’s technology. In this sense, many of his answers have been corrected for better accuracy. Now users can create their AI characters and beat them easily to establish ownership of the characters. Coin costs and environmental costs have declined over time thanks to Ethereum’s recent evidence of stake shift and transaction growth, Khan said.
“The flywheel has gotten stronger and we’ve created an intelligence layer that’s extremely powerful,” he said. “We have collected 15 million API calls, 118 million API tokens have been consumed, and we have collected approximately half a million datasets to expand the conversation datasets. Now developers and makers can build on this layer of intelligence that we call CharacterGPT.”
Now the character creator can generate a new character in about a minute. You can then start a chat conversation with the character and then try using it for a variety of things, from game avatars to ecommerce chatbots. Khan showed me how easy it was in a demo.
“You saw how easy the process was, and this means it’s going to be a lot easier for creators and consumers to create all kinds of applications, whether it’s a companion, coach, or a character in the metaverse,” Khan said.
For example, you can play chess with a virtual character from Alan Turing. It was a long journey for Khan to get here. Creating the first AI character, Alice, took about a year. Then it took about six months to get better at it. Now it takes a minute.
“We’ve democratized character creation and we’ve got massive scale and massive speed,” he said. “Just as essay generation has been somewhat democratized by Chad GPT. This is an exponential curve.”
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