How A.I. knocked out NFTs for the #1 spot
Fearmongering about Artificial Intelligence
"Isn't the smallest chance of victory enough of a reason for us to keep on fighting? The world needs us, Rangers."
— Jason, The Red Ranger
In the first grade of Elementary School, the Power Rangers TV show was the only religion. It was the only subject that my peer group of 6-year-old boys talked about. I had to rush home after school and get my homework done by 4 pm, so I didn’t miss an episode. On the off chance that I didn’t get my homework done in time, I had to lock the door to the room with the only TV and watch the show at the lowest possible volume that was audible to only me. My peer group, which was mainly composed of Jason The Red Ranger fanboys - broke up when Tommy the Green Ranger was introduced. The traitors betrayed the Red Ranger fan club to create a separate Green Ranger faction. The Red Ranger faction held strong until the episode, where the Green Ranger destroyed the entire Power Ranger team by himself. Then threw the whole team out of their Mega Zords … I didn’t even want to go to school the next day. It would be silly if all these years later I was still upset at the Green Ranger faction for betraying the Red Ranger, when my anger should be directed at Zordon. He allowed that traitor to join the main Power Rangers team…ugh. The Green Ranger used a Dagger flute to summon a Mecha Dragon that rose out of the ocean with a drill tail and could fire missiles out of its fingertips. I mean * whispering * I guess he was kinda cool *. While writing this article, I found out that, Jason David Frank, the actor who played the role of the Green Ranger, tragically died.
The Green Ranger Lives on… RIP Jason David Frank
The obligatory tribute to my childhood has been addressed…time to fearmonger about Artificial Intelligence (AI). We’re all gonna die!!! The year 2022 started with a dominant showing from NFTs, an emergent use for blockchain. Many speculators in the NFT space became multi-millionaires overnight, then FTX crashed, and they lost it all just as fast. With the release of AI image generators such as DALL-E 2, Mid-Journey v4, and Stable Diffusion v2 which allows anyone to generate amazing images with a simple text prompt. Suddenly AI has emerged as the dominant emerging technology and the NFT that Justin Bieber spent $3m to buy is now worth $90k. Before I start fearmongering about AI by using troupes from Black Mirror, and The Terminator series, let’s ground it in reality.
Run for your life… AI is coming!!!
Open AI has been dominating this year with its industry-disrupting AI applications such as DALL-E 2, Whisper, and ChatGPT. DALL-E 2 is the premier text-to-image app that generates an image based on a given text prompt. Whisper can transcribe real-time speech from any language into text. ChatGPT uses Open AI’s core model fine-tuned for dialogue and can be engaged with as a chatbot. The process of fine-tuning uses less data than when training the model. The aforementioned applications are built on a large language model (LLM) called Generative Pre-trained Transformer - 3rd generation (GPT-3). The core function of GPT-3 is to generally understand the meaning behind human language, known as Natural Language Processing (NLP). GPT-3 allows the machine to effectively comprehend human speech, then translate it into binary machine code. GPT-3 joins the ranks of other LLMs such as Google’s BERT, Meta’s Galactica, and Microsoft’s TURING NLG. The GPT-3 deep learning model was trained with 175 billion parameters. The amount of parameters allows the AI to generate convincing text that seems like a human wrote it. Before GPT-3, Microsoft’s TURING NLG was the largest AI model trained with 10 billion parameters. A LLM has several use cases that must be properly understood before I can comprehensively fearmonger about AI.
Terrifying….
The first use case for Large Language Models (LLM) is the one that we’re all familiar with, which is its ability to generate content. This content could be art, movie scripts, entire novels, and even videos and 3D objects. The important thing to keep in mind is that AI does not perceive the content in the same way that humans do. The AI identifies a set of patterns in a variety of text and images, then follow those patterns to create something original. I want to make a distinction between “original” and “new”, the AI can only be inspired by what already exists. So artists worried about AI stealing their jobs, stop worrying…for now. Another use case for LLMs is their ability to summarize large swats of data in seconds to milliseconds. Entire books and encyclopedias can be summarized in the blink of an eye by these LLMs. That doesn’t mean that it is always accurate, as discovered by Meta’s Galactica model a few weeks ago. LLMs are capable of rewriting text, which is a use case that we are all familiar with when we try to text message, “Go duck yourself.” LLMs can also be used to extract only the key points from a large amount of text.
I don’t know what this is but an AI made it…so be scared! ( Stable Diffusion v2.1)
Now the moment we’ve all been waiting for … BOO! Are you scared yet? BOO! What about now? I can do this all day. I don’t think we should be afraid of AI. It’s more of a tool than anything else. All tools can be misused and mishandled. For example, a Chef’s knife can be used to create amazing dishes at a 5-star restaurant, or it can carve up your cheating boyfriend. It’s not the knife’s fault it was misused. The same logic can be applied to AI, we can use it to increase our productivity and rapidly pioneer prototypes that will make the world a better place, or we can end life itself. I consider myself an expert in this field because I spent all of 2022 trying to get 100% completion, Game of the Year (IMO), Horizon: Forbidden West. It took me 133 hours to beat it, so trust me when I say that I know what I’m talking about. Everyone is terrified about AI. Artists are scared that no one will want human art anymore. My response to them is that AI art makes human art even more valuable. Look at the above monstrosity that I created, it’s kind of cool looking, but it’s nothing close to what I was trying to create. I sympathize with artists when they complain that the LLM models are being trained using their artwork without fair compensation. Maybe future LLMs can integrate ERC721 Smart Contracts to compensate the humans that contributed to the model’s competence. Each instance a contributor is mentioned in a prompt by an engineer, then that contributor should receive a portion of the cost to mint the prompt. That’s our AI / Metaverse / Blockchain approach. Check out our full breakdown of how we plan to use AI in our blockchain-based metaverse by watching the video below.
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