Op-Ed: Building AI into Web3 Isn’t a Replacement for Humans. It’s a Path Toward Personalization 

“AI Should Augment Human Intelligence, Not Replace It,” wrote a 2021 Harvard Business Review article on the predicted impact, potential dangers, and growing opportunities of an AI-enabled world. In the three years since, AI discourse, controversy, and impact have only grown. There have been similarly progressive takes on AI’s role in “helping to create productivity gains and spread prosperity” through providing support (vs. total replacement) to humans, doomsayer-esque warnings, the case for inevitability, and calls for outright bans (especially in creative fields). 

Nearly everyone these days has an opinion on AI, often falling somewhere between pro and anti — we even have a name for those who sit on either side of the AI-sle. 

In a space that’s reimagined the process for creating, sharing, and selling art and other digital assets, it was only a matter of time before the Great AI Debate spread its neural networks across web3 and NFTs. As an industry and evolving set of technologies, web3 has already reimagined — and drastically improved — how we can transmit knowledge and value through automated processes that remove the need for human intervention and total oversight. With that has come criticism, both from the centralized finance powers that be and some from the old guard of art, as well as the need for careful consideration. 

Like AI, vast innovation in web3 can cause dangers with genuine consequences. Whether it’s sci-fi’s dystopian portraits of singularity (see Skynet) or the potential vulnerability of smart contracts to exploits (see hackers), we often face the same questions: just how far down the rabbit hole do we want to go? 

While these questions are important and sometimes even exhilarating to ask, we’re a long way from ChatGPT taking over. Stolen funds in cryptocurrency have dropped in the last year alongside increased awareness, improved security technologies, and enhanced regulatory measures. 

The (right) question is: How do we leverage innovation and disruptive new tools to not replace but enhance the old? For the growing use cases where web3 and AI can intersect and help both technologies evolve and improve, the answer lies in personalization. 

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The need for something different

Generative art, the act of creating art through an autonomous system (often algorithmically driven and computer-generated), isn’t a replacement for human creativity, just as AI isn’t the end of human creators. Early computer artists like innovators Manfred Mohr and Vera Molnar wrote some of the first algorithms of what would later become classified as generative art. Molnar once said, “The computer helps, but it does not ′do′, does not ′design′ or ′invent′ anything” in an article on AI and creativity. The article also referenced computer scientist Alan Turning’s groundbreaking Turing Test, which helps discover a machine’s ability to mimic intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human. Then there’s Nick Szabo, the computer scientist credited for inventing smart contracts as part of a project that initially set out to improve the limitations of a traditional finance system of records. Did either of these innovators want to remove humans completely from the equation? Likely not. Instead, they wanted to make things more efficient, faster, fairer, and more powerful. 

The growing adoption of AI and web3 speaks volumes to the appetite for change, especially in the consumer arena. Just as humans enjoy taking control of their knowledge and processes with the help of chatbots, consumers want the same for the brands and products they engage with. Many young people, especially those in Gen Z, have grown tired of the cold, unidirectional, and static relationships that were once commonplace between consumers and brands. Just look at Roblox’s 2023 Digital Expressions report, which discovered Gen Z’s physical style is often inspired by their avatars (84%), a brand’s digital fashion inspires them to consider the brand in the physical world (84%), and self-expression in the digital world outweighs that of the physical world (2 out of 5). Another study found that 75% of Gen Z are likely to buy a product if they can customize it, while 66% believe more technology should “talk” to each other to create a personalized experience among websites, apps, and appliances. 

The connective tissue? Personalization, a process drastically improved and simplified with AI-enabled computers and products. In the metaverse, across virtual environments like Roblox, Somnium Space, or Sandbox, it’s already happening — and working.

Sandbox founder Sebastien Borget said AI would “accelerate and empower even more creators,” while his company noted AI’s power to make the metaverse safer, more diverse, and “less empty” in a blog post that detailed available AI-enabled tools for creators. An article on Forbes on Ready Players Me’s launch of a new property similarly focused on using AI to power avatar creation for unlimited outfit customization. Nike is also exploring developing its own generative AI models to help design products using their coveted athlete data as part of a new AI-generated 3D printing project, A.I.R.

And that’s just the tip of the AI iceberg, where AI-generated wearables and avatars are quickly becoming the personalized atomic unit of the metaverse. 

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Where to look — and build

As many agree, mass adoption of web3 requires the arrival of more consumer-friendly applications. In this growing space of opportunity, AI (and a growing emphasis on personalization products) may be the missing piece to help users and brands capitalize on growth through improved UX and increased accessibility. Many in-market examples are already out there and thriving. There are onchain co-creation communities, AI-powered trading tools, personalized in-wallet notifications (i.e., web3-native ads), GPU-driven gaming experiences in the cloud, and much more. These examples help fuel web3 adoption by personalizing and automating processes based on user habits and preferences. 

Builders of all kinds should be thinking about how to extract (and expand on) the strongest elements of web3 and AI technologies. The options are vast, and growing by the day: integrating AI-powered onchain analytics, building across open-source, AI-integrated environments, offering wallets with AI-powered trading alerts or AI-enabled onchain creator tools, and using machine learning to help build more powerful consumer products in web3. By doing so, forward-thinking companies and their products can help connect the dots between these two evolving categories and bring personalized experiences to their users.

As a result, AI can help make web3 products and communities less intimidating, technical, and even transactional. This opportunity is win-win: it empowers users to take back control of their creativity and time spent online while enabling brands to offer tools that make engaging with their IP more customizable, efficient, inviting, and fun. 

Maybe the red pill isn’t so bad after all. 

Editor’s note: Neil Mullins is the CEO of Mojito, an enterprise-focused web3 platform.