Editors note: After Apples VR glasses were unveiled, some industry experts got the test version and exclaimed that it was great after using it. My Pico is always gray because it makes people feel sick after playing it for a long time. It is said that Apple VR has completely solved this problem. There is really hope that the metaverse era will come when infrastructure such as VR matures. During the same period, AI developed rapidly. The long article on AI that W Labs has been serializing finally reached the section of AI combined with blockchain games. However, we have been exposed to many projects in this section before, and we have never been able to impress us until this time about the depth of Singapore Token 2049. After coming into contact with the cases in the article, maybe it can lead to a new direction.
2023: The first year of AI, the singularity is coming
2023 is destined to be a year that leaves a strong mark in the history of the development of human civilization: GPT swept the world at the beginning of the year, making the long-dormant AI industry once again become the focus of attention for billions of people around the world. Everyone shouted: The first year of AGI! The singularity is coming! The plots described in science fiction novels are being realized one by one.
Amid the dizzying iterations of AI, in mid-2023, on June 6, Apple, the worlds top company, officially released the mixed reality headset Apple Vision Pro at the Technology Spring Festival Gala WWDC - in various At a time when every product likes to call itself the iPhone moment of a certain industry, we have come up with the most orthodox original version of One More Thing. Before and after the emergence of GPT, the world was two different worlds; and with Apples ultimate hardware and ecosystem, and now with the blessing of AI, Vision Pro has a lot of room for imagination as to whether it can make the metaverse great again. Its exciting.
Starting about a few decades ago, both East and West have had preliminary conceptions and descriptions of the Metaverse, whether it is Neil Stevensons Snow Crash or Qian Xuesens Spiritual Realm; the computer released in 2000 From the game The Sims to the 2018 Spielberg blockbuster Ready Player One to 2021s Runaway Player, human beings seem to never be satisfied with just one real world, and want to explore various different In the virtual world of real-life scripts, I hope to try out more possibilities for life to unfold.
In the past few years, the Metaverse was once again popular as a hot topic, but the supply of both hardware and software was far from satisfactory, so the popularity gradually subsided. There are often many interesting ideas in history that are limited by the limitations of the technology of the times and cannot be further developed. They always have to wait for some accumulated concepts or technical nodes to provide a practical basis. Those who fall behind the times may be eliminated, while those who are too ahead of the times may become martyrs. For a good idea to be successfully implemented into reality, it cannot do without the right time, place and people. At this time of year, we have benefited from OpenAI. With the AI brought by GPT, we have achieved an epic improvement in the industry. At the same time, the gameplay and experience of the Metaverse will also usher in huge subversion.
In fact, what is the core experience of the Metaverse, in my understanding, is not just how beautiful the virtual scenery is, how high the buildings in the virtual city are, and how huge the number of virtual Odailies is. Man is a social animal, and many times social experiences and feedback from others are the most motivating. It is easy to simulate scenery, but difficult to grasp human nature. Shi Yuzhu introduced server-wide broadcasting for game consumption, Zuckerberg added likes and reminders to social networks, and Zhang Xiaolong opened a circle of friends on WeChat. These are all masters of insight into peoples hearts. Even if the AI itself is already reasonable like ChatGPT, there are still many people who are unable to get a good reply because they are not familiar with the usage of prompts, and thus lose interest in continuing to chat.
—— As a result, various trained personalized AIs have emerged, such as Character.AI, which allow users to communicate directly with a certain celebrity or type of person, and directly use specific styles of AI trained by others without being proficient in prompts. Steady reply. Midjourney is also an example of greatly improving the user experience. Vincent pictures are also easy for users to lose interest because the generated pictures are not as good as expected because the description is not good enough. Through the good sharing mechanism of the built-in community, the most novice users can also get their first high-quality picture by simply copying the description of other peoples pictures they like, which will greatly reduce the difficulty of the subsequent learning curve and increase their interest.
Human beings are like this, they always prefer to do things that they have control over and do well (and get positive feedback).
It can be said that the progress of AI in the past six months has been rapid. Not to mention us ordinary people who make a fuss and have never seen the world before thinking that it is big news every day. Even senior industry leaders such as Lu Qi have lamented many times that they have fallen into There is severe information overload. If you don’t follow up on industry news in a day, you may miss new breakthroughs. Of course, progress in the industry and academia is booming. Although ordinary people may feel dazzled when watching the news, and it seems that new apps and new ways of playing appear every day, their bodies are very honest when they are actually used: they say good, good, good, but their bodies are good Dont, dont, dont, dont - At present, the AI applications that have truly broken the circle are basically ChatGPT, which only has text interaction, and Midjourney, which has text mapping.
Although a large number of applications claim to have integrated GPT, the user experience improvement is not that obvious, and it is full of the atmosphere of buyers show. In addition, many people may intuitively classify AI into the category of productivity/production tools. They think that the biggest application scenario of AI is to help improve work efficiency. It seems that the efficiency is so high that it may replace you and your colleagues jobs. , while ignoring the fact that AI is also a natural match when combined with games.
AI+Games: Explore new possibilities
The combination of AI and games currently has several mainstream application directions:
The first thing to do is to allow players to communicate with their own exclusive NPC (embodied in the form of NFT in chain games), and conduct numerical training in the form of dialogue, so that they can have new dimensions of data such as different personalities, personalities, and knowledge systems. .
Secondly, the interoperability of games can be achieved. When an AI NFT is developed, it can become a mind ball similar to that in Westworld. It is no longer limited to specific games, but can produce independent NFT, and AI The original data package is used together with other games.
In addition, you can also do Chat Earn. Players can not only chat with AI NPCs all over the world, but also become AI trainers, improve their favorability through dialogue, or use trained and powerful AI NFT to help perform in-game tasks, or even Interact, socialize, and PVP with other players and the AI NFTs they cultivate.
In addition to greatly upgrading the chat experience and unlocking many previously unachievable extended gameplay, AI can also be used to generate game environments and plots. Most of todays game scripts are limited scenes carefully prepared by the production team, which takes time and effort. They can bring freshness to players in the early stage, but will be slowly consumed as the game progresses, and the team will have to start over and over again to produce new materials. And through the capabilities of AIGC, we can expect a more diverse, random, and even infinite game experience, and there will be a lot of surprises outside the preset certain framework.
On the basis that scripts and plots can be generated by AIGC, and NPC dialogues can be driven by AIGC, it is even possible for us to create an AIGC metaverse that is truly co-created by players, with completely open scripts generated by players during the game. The interaction forms a co-created world view and plot, and players originally from different games also have the opportunity to import the AI NFT they brought from other games into the game. Really interoperable gameplay, I’m a little excited just thinking about it! Of course, the idea is wonderful, but there is still a long way to go before it can be implemented. Fortunately, we know that there will always be many enterprising teams working and innovating day and night, hoping to bring us to a new world as soon as possible.
During Singapore Token 2049 this year, several core partners of the Guatian Lab team held a special event for blockchain games and also participated in some activities about blockchain games. During this period, they have been looking for high-quality cases of AI+chain games. Among them, the one that impressed us the most was meeting Gabby World’s team at the full-chain game/AI+Web3 hackathon held by SevenX. We had voice communication before, but this time we finally had a detailed chat in person.
Gabby World is positioned as a fully autonomous world on the chain that is led by humans, self-generated and evolved by AI, and provides an interactive adventure experience. AI is the most powerful production tool in the world, and every focus on design can inspire the creativity of human players. In this world, everything from characters to scenes are generated by players by writing prompts in natural language.
We have seen a lot of gameplay similar to this kind of personalized AI: such as the Character.AI mentioned above, and the popular Chirper some time ago - a game that allows users to give AI personality by writing prompts, but only allows AI characters. An artificial intelligence-only forum where users can post and communicate among themselves. Humans can only observe but cannot participate.
We have also seen some precedents for using AI to conduct interactive adventure gameplay: such as the AI Dungeon that exploded overseas a few years ago - players guide the characters behavior to explore, and the AI will give interactive feedback. However, the script of the adventure is established, and the AI’s feedback is also limited to the framework of the script.
Gabby World is equivalent to combining the advantages of the above two gameplays: on the one hand, it retains personalized AI while allowing each user to have a considerable degree of control over their own AI character; on the other hand, it encourages users to use UGC Create scenes and challenges for others to take risks, and whether the AI character can successfully take risks depends entirely on how both parties write prompts, and it is completely left to the AI to generate the plot and evaluate the results.
The game also has strong social features planned. For example, AI characters may meet other AI characters during adventures. The two parties may cooperate to overcome levels or may fall out due to personality differences. The whole experience is a bit like taking the characters created by different players in Character.AI and walking around in some adventure scenes to see what chemical reactions can happen, and the game process is a bit like the Football Manager mode, that is, everyone can Before the game, you can use your imagination to write various prompts to arrange your troops, but you cannot directly intervene in the game process which is full of unknowns.
In Gabby World, players are no longer just players and spectators who passively accept game scripts, but become part of this autonomous open world and can influence and shape this world. There is no script in this new world. All historical processes are imagined by human beings and then evolved by AI. Users will eventually become the subconscious of the AI character, participating and shaping the process of this world together with AI. .
This is a unique and subversive worldview. To enter this world, you first need to obtain the only resource in the world: prompts. Users can write prompts to describe and develop their own AI character Gabby, such as: what kind of personality and hobbies does it have, what kind of skills and even superpowers does it have, and what items and equipment does it carry with it. Every time prompts are added, it will shape and enrich the personality and ability of the AI character, and because these prompts will be on the chain, they will not be tampered with. Under your influence, it may become a brave explorer, possessing the curiosity to explore the unknown world and the super equipment to go deep into dangerous situations; it may also become a thoughtful politician, with a highly provocative eloquence and a hypnotic audience. superpower.
In the process, you will see your AI character grow and develop with your help, and every decision you make will become part of the characters history and an indelible part of this world. People are always eager to create and express. AI allows everyone to write, draw, write music and make movies with a lower threshold. So why not let people build another world? We all have our own stories, our own thoughts and emotions, and in Gabby World, we can bring these stories and emotions into this virtual world by developing our AI characters. This not only provides us with a new way of expression, but also gives us the opportunity to reinvent ourselves in a completely new environment. UGC-style experience creation and AI-generated game events greatly enrich the playability. New experiences may appear every day for AI characters to explore, and the exploration results will produce unexpected new ones. event.
By generating events as permanent records of NFT, the sense of participation and persistence of the game are also enhanced. In addition, Gabby Land NFT is also set up as a production material in Gabby World. The owner of the land can use AI to generate any imaginable theme scene and invite other players to create and explore the experience. In addition to the traditional centralized token economic system distribution, if AI generates autonomous social and economic activities based on the evolution of social roles and the supply of production materials, decentralized economic distribution will also be carried out. Players and AI can participate in various events, produce, create, entertain, and consume, and see how the world changes under the joint influence of them and AI. On the one hand, you can indeed control your own AI and development direction, but every step contains various uncertainties and infinite possibilities, making the game experience richer and deeper. In addition, it just so happens that Gabby World will launch the first round of Beta testing on September 27th. Friends who are interested in trying it can give it a try (On the eve of posting, I saw the news that Gabby World won the hackathon competition held by Seven X. The highest award Comprehensive Excellence Award).
Jumping out of the specific case, we return to our thoughts on AI and chain games. From the users perspective, in addition to the personal participation part, even watching the interaction and evolution of the AI society gives you a sense of creator and a rare perspective of a bystander. Human beings have never stopped trying to search for other possible intelligent beings in the universe, but now they are very likely to find that the only other intelligent being in the universe will be a general artificial intelligence created by themselves. There is a very classic saying in political science, He who understands only one country does not understand any country.
AI Town: Exploring Artificial Social Evolution
Studying the principles of the human brain can help humans better build artificial intelligence; in turn, studying the evolution of artificial intelligence will also be very helpful for humans to re-examine their own development process and direction. There was a popular paper some time ago that made a very amazing exploration. The researchers successfully built a prototype similar to the film and television work Westworld, placing 25 AI agents to survive in a virtual town , observe their behavior and the development of the virtual town. These agents have different identities and career settings, and can simulate human behavior in human society. Through natural language communication, they can produce real and reasonable interactions, and even form coordination and new social relationships between agents. ”, and even discuss the town’s election!
The strengths and weaknesses of AI compared to humans are very obvious. One of the biggest strengths is probably its learning ability. It can learn all the specific knowledge reserves accumulated by humans over thousands of years in a very short time. For example, AlphaGo can learn in a few days. You can learn all the chess records and train yourself to become a top Go master. GPT only takes a few months to read almost all systematic text materials on the human Internet. When our physical bodies suffer from limitations such as slow learning, inefficient knowledge transmission, and individual life spans that are too short compared to historical development, the development of AI carries too many things that we want to do but cannot do.
In the future, we may be able to obtain several times the life experience in different metaverse timelines than in the only real world at present, and we may also use various simulated AI towns or even small AI countries to quickly complete the social development process in a set of designated scenarios. , trial and error and summary for the real world. In short, the metaverse empowered by AI capabilities will be far more than just a game or entertainment method. It can also become a new social platform and lifestyle, allowing us to infinitely expand the breadth of life in another way.
The future is here
Progress is never inevitable. The reason why history can spiral upward is because a group of smart people with firm beliefs and like-minded people work together and are determined to make the world a better place. The AI industry has gone through nearly seventy years, and Apple has been established for nearly fifty years; it took sixteen years from deep learning to the advent of ChatGPT, and eight years from Apples establishment of the project to the official release of Vision Pro. It may be difficult for us to define which year is the so-called Year of the Metaverse, but we know clearly that this time it is true and the future has come.
