The age of living, talking, intelligent artworks has begun.
A groundbreaking collaboration with Alethea AI, Robert Alice’s To the Young Artists of Cyberspace (2021) presents the most technologically advanced NFT ever made. The first intelligent, responsive NFT (iNFT) to be distributed for sale and public release, Alice and Alethea AI offers the audience the ability to converse live with an iNFT, and a collector the ability to own the experience.
A landmark development in both the history of art and NFTs, this historic NFT asks many thought-provoking questions - What do interactive and intelligent relationships between artwork and its viewer mean for the trajectory of art history? How does this change our definition of art? How is ownership defined in an age of intelligent artforms? Where does creativity lie? With the artist or the AI - or even perhaps the audience as a decentralized cultural collective?
Robert Alice who is a London-based artist in the crypto art and NFT space commented: "While still raw, interacting with this form of intelligence is a fundamentally mind-shifting experience. This artwork I hope will allow the global public to interact for the first time with the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence on a one-to-one basis. Even 30 seconds of conversation leaves one pondering not just its significance for the history of art, but the trajectory of humanity’s continued engagement with this technology. Combining this sort of technology with NFTs only supercharges one’s imagination to ideas around owning and collecting intelligence itself."
Arif Khan, CEO of Alethea AI commented: “NFTs are going to serve as an important foundation in preserving and amplifying our culture." At Alethea AI, we are originators of a new standard for NFTs, the Intelligent NFT (iNFT), that we believe will expand the possibilities of what an NFT is capable of representing. When embedded with AI, an iNFT ‘comes alive’ and interacts with a level of intelligence that relies on state-of-the-art Language transformer models like GPT-3. The generative possibilities are endless. As creators of the iNFT protocol, we’ve been privileged to witness an artist of the caliber of Robert Alice, push the boundaries of what iNFTs can do, and are proud to co-create this work with them.”
An iNFT is an intelligent NFT that is embedded with a GPT-3 prompt as part of its immutable smart contract. The iNFT generated is not only perceivably intelligent but has both interactive and animation capabilities as carefully crafted prompts are stored at the smart contract layer. The hard-coded prompts call upon a state-of-the-art Transformer Language model (GPT-3) to facilitate generative possibilities only possible through recent breakthroughs in few-shot and single-shot learning.
The artwork centered around the idea of bringing an art manifesto to life, Alice and Alethea AI present a living, breathing document delivered through the character of a modern-day Alice. Using seed text written by Robert Alice as the basis for Alethea AI’s proprietary AI model that sits on top of GPT-3 (called GPT-X), the avatar has been coded with its own personality and will answer any questions on the nature of itself, NFTs and iNFTs, ranging from the profound to the absurd. With each question asked, the artificial intelligence that sits behind the work will continue refining itself. In this, the idea of a manifesto moves from a static, historical document to one where a sense of cultural decentralization occurs - the audience themselves become as much a creator of the iNFTs responses as the artist.
A play on the opening title of the Manifesto of the Futurist Painters (1910), which revolutionized artists at the time with the call, “To the Young Artists of Italy”, this ‘manifesto’ is delivered by a character named Alice. The iNFT is built using generic stock CGI models and focuses on the overlooked, underappreciated portraits found in these digital archives so central to the NFT space.
This idea of the ‘placeholder’ or ‘overlooked’ equally refers to the semantic importance of the character of Alice in the history of cryptography - a character we encounter time and again across white papers. With speech and personality inflected with the idioms of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, the character merges these visual references to a modern-day Alice with Carroll’s 19th-century character. The synthesis draws comparisons between the literary nonsense genre as popularised by Carroll and the groundbreaking innovations in neural net language AI some 150 years later. Much like in AI, language, logic and mathematics are all central creative concerns in Carroll’s masterpiece. As Alice converses, with answers and statements that range from the profound to the unintendedly absurd, the literary nonsense genre is resurrected in AI form.
The work offered at Sotheby’s presents itself in two parts, first the iNFT itself; and alongside it a portfolio of standard NFTs with neural net statements taken from the iNFT that act as a form of historical documentation for the collector. The iNFT in its current state offers a tantalizing glimmer of a future in which neural net language models will sit on top of decentralized blockchains, allowing true and trustless ownership of intelligent characters. Far ahead of this time, this iNFT in its current form is built across a bridge of decentralized and centralized structures. On the decentralized side, the image, seed text and AI fingerprint of the character are hosted on Arweave, with the lip syncing, neural net and voice fed from centralized databases, such as Amazon and Google. This will likely mean that over time the intelligence of the NFT will slowly fade as the centralized databases dis-attach from the decentralized side, returning the artwork to its truly decentralized form, that of the image, seed text and character, a memorial to the first iNFT to be offered publicly for sale. From then on, both these decentralized elements and the portfolio of NFTs that constitute its historical documentation will take primacy, awaiting the ability for its intelligence to be resurrected on the creation of a fully decentralized structure for neural networks to exist on.
Alethea AI is a decentralized protocol to create intelligent and interactive NFTs powered by GPT-3. They are originators of the iNFT standard and are on the cutting edge of embedding AI animation, interaction and generative AI capabilities into NFTs. We are part of a select cohort that is helping to test and refine Open AI’s state-of-the-art GPT-3 technology. Through our award-winning AI Avatar studio, we enable the creation, monetization and ownership of Intelligent NFTs resulting in a thriving and diverse metaverse.
Written by Ben Gentilli, the artist and founder behind Robert Alice.
