Technology hype cycles that excite and worry people as expected as the times change. This year the conversation is about artificial intelligence (AI).
OpenAI’s ChatGPT can save the business world or automate it. Stable Diffusion and Lensa apps can disrupt the art business or open up a new world of creativity to newcomers with big ideas. As with all innovations, these tools lead to as many questions and concerns as optimistic use cases.
This article is part of CoinDesk’s “Culture Week.” Caitlin Burns is the story director at Palm NFT Studio.
Fortunately, another technological innovation, Web3, can take AI in a more manageable and democratic direction. The difference can be seen by examining previous hype cycles around virtual and augmented reality (aka VR and AR), which require big budgets, big teams and big hardware.
While there are many players in Web3, it is also a field for anyone to join and make an impact. And, at least for now, the same is true for AI. Together, these technologies emerge to make technology more “multiplayer.” And in particular, Web3 and AI have democratized 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 taking images that are “trained” on their devices, and if their devices can facilitate spamming of those people or create malware (they do). The debate will continue. But for many creators these tools are quickly becoming integrated into workflows. OpenAI went from zero to over a million users in less than five days.
There is a clear need for tools that help people create written and visual content easily. For creators who are good with ideas and prompts but aren’t seasoned artists themselves, access to text-to-image apps is especially exciting. Being able to conceptualize your ideas can mean making better pitches, working faster with creative teams. You can build projects faster and at lower costs. And while the output of these images may not be perfect, they are good enough to convey an idea in a simple, visual format.
There are some delightful pieces being built with AI art tools, though it’s early days for public use. Bestiary Chronicles uses AI art to shape Steve Coulson’s original human-written stories. An 11-year-old boy wrote a text-based video game on ChatGPT that went viral. MusicLM allows users to create music from text. There’s an endless “Seinfeld”-like show on Twitch. Finally, CatGPT generates text based on the cat’s human language prompts. It might be a chatbot but you’re not there zeitgeist until you are a cat meme.
The world will continue to refine, regulate and determine the long-term need for the capabilities of these technologies but they make a promise: AI artistic tools allow creators to express their ideas immediately and at a lower cost than before.
While a solo creator can create a work of art using AI art apps without collaborators, Web3 projects help people learn how to create stories and products together in real life. time. Non-fungible token (NFT) collections such as Broadside, DC Bat Cowls and DuskBreakers were created to unite audience members through highly interactive features accessible through ownership. They are designed to create a community and allow that community to come together.
These generative storytelling NFT projects give each holder a character and the keys to shaping the storyworld. For some collections, such as the original Batman comic series “Batman: The Legacy Cowl,” the work is done in real time by DC Comics artists, based on community votes. Other projects like Broadside give collectors the ability to write and create their own world stories thanks to CC0 licenses.
Similarly, governance tooling provides a framework for individuals to learn how to create, together. DAOs rely on collective decision-making supported by Web3 technology to guide the growth of shared tools, resources and environments. Although these communal structures have also emerged and developed along with the regulatory standard, it is clear that there are two major innovations taking place, and as they meet, more interesting things will come to life.
What we’re starting to see is the foundation for 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.
When you want to bring an idea to life, you can now generate your first ideas fast. If you want to start creating a project for what you’ve done, you can use Web3 mechanics like tokenized ownership, generative storytelling and management.
As these technology categories converge, the possibilities for shared creation are exciting. With more access, and more participation, what will the storytelling formats of the future look like? As we begin to collaborate deeper in the code, we may also begin to collaborate with each other.
