Alethea AI launched its emotive and expressive AI agents on Coinbase’s Base blockchain to bring AI agents to creators, consumers and businesses.
This user-friendly application brings the power of high-fidelity AI agents directly to creators, users, and businesses, making it easier than ever to harness the creative and economic benefits of generative and agentic AI, said Arif Khan, CEO of Alethea AI, in an interview with GamesBeat.
High fidelity avatars with vivid facial expressions can be generated on Aliagents.ai using Alethea AI’s proprietary Emote Engine.
The Emote Engine of Alethea AI powers the high-fidelity facial animations and body movements of these onchain AI agents.
With the ability to conjure a kaleidoscope of emotions, from the subtle nuances of concentration and doubt to the exuberance of laughter and happiness, Alethea’s Emote Engine sets a new standard in AI interaction, Khan said.
Whether your ALI agents need to convey agreement, amusement, or even flirtatiousness, the engine delivers with stunning fidelity and realism, Khan said.
The digital companions can seamlessly transition from neutral to surprised, from annoyed to mischievous, with a goal of blending virtual and reality. With each update, Alethea AI is expanding the emotional spectrum, ensuring that AI experiences are not just engaging, but memorable.
Creators can also use the platform to customize their own anime-style or realistic ALI agents, among the many image generation options provided on the platform.
“You can create your dream character,” Khan said. “You can fine-tune the personality in the agent customization page and fine-tune what your character will do when responding to your community.”
The company has around 60 to 70 people, and it has raised $20 million to date, Khan said.
Monetization through customizable AI agents
For the first time, creators of AI agents can directly monetize their innovative efforts without a centralized entity censoring them or taking the lion’s share of revenue, Khan said. The nice thing about AI and blockchain is it can create a path around the gatekeepers.
Besides real-time interactivity and rapid creation of ALI agents, through the novel integration of blockchain-based smart contracts, creators can incentivize engagement and nurture a vibrant community around their ALI agents.
This ecosystem not only facilitates economic transactions but also paves the way for a new model of community-driven, creative collaboration, Khan said. Because the ALI agents are on the BASE blockchain, gas transactions are significantly lower, leading to greater interactions and higher monetization possibilities for Creators. These ALI agents can also be deployed easily in gaming and metaverse environments, Khan said.
How the avatars can work
ALIAgents.ai is leveraging the Emote Engine, which is a high-fidelity AI engine that allows you to create interesting interactive characters with emotions and facial expressions, Khan said.
Maliha Akhtar, product manager at ALIagents.ai, showed one example of Vladimir Putin and what he would look like if he were a hippie who was into music and poetry. Akhtar also showed a lifelike version of an avatar of me. It was a lot better than a prior digital twin of me. It is designed so fans can interact with me and have conversations about the kind of things that I am known for talking about. This is made possible through the knowledge base feature allowing users to upload specific data for the ALI agent to learn. Using the blockchain, fans can purchase keys that allow for exclusive co-creativity between the user and the ALI agent.
They could also create interactions with a version of me, where Dean Takahashi the avatar is a poet. I could upload files to its knowledge base of my corpus. I could embed my ALI agent on a Dean fan website or integrate him into gaming environments.
“You can generate multimedia generative AI experiences,” Khan said.
“One agentic feature of ALI Agents is the ability to send you selfies in context with your interaction. These selfies can be cross-posted on social platforms like Twitter and Telegram through an automated feature on the platform,” Akhtar added.
Alethea AI stays in the clear on copyright or trademark issues by making sure it has consent for the creation of an avatar.
“Because the platform is open, we want to allow people to be able to create all sorts of different characters. People have created different satirical, anime and productivity agents,” Khan said. “We have a safety function here. I can report this agent if I find that it is offensive or harmful, or promotes violence. For any harmful creation or IP violation, the platform is using the community to report it so it can be taken care of.”
Differentiation
One of the goals is to distinguish these avatars from other chatbots with the high-fidelity nature of the emotive and agent AI.
“Having this full body expressiveness is important. The other level of differentiation is one thing if you look at OpenAI, or generally any of these GPT bots, they’re not really showing you how you can earn revenue. They are saying that you will earn something or they will do revenue share with you, for example, but they don’t tell you how much and you’re sort of at their mercy,” Khan said.
Other people could create a likeness of you and perhaps you might not make anything as a creator. But with smart contracts and the blockchain, you can make money, Khan said.
Khan said the platform’s monetization mechanism will favor creators and be fairly implemented through the transparency of the blockchain.
“You can earn from your AI,” Khan said. “That’s the exciting thing for a lot of our creators.”
The benefits of combining AI and blockchain
Khan believes that the difference between now and a couple of years ago is not only the effectiveness and speed of creation with generative AI. It is also now clear that integrating AI and blockchain makes sense, he said.
Alethea AI debuted the first intelligent NFT (iNFT) almost three years ago now, working with Open AI on GPT. It was auctioned for $478,800 on Sotheby’s on June 10, 2021.
“We’ve been building at the intersection of generative AI and blockchain for years now. The thesis has still remained the same,” Khan said. “In general, AI is an abundance engine. And blockchains are like scarcity engines. So it’s almost like a yin-yang. And these two are converging right now in the world. People are very interested in the intersection of these two. There is a lot of vapor out there, unfortunately. So we’re excited to share what is actually real.”
“When you combine these two technologies, you can see what is possible,” Khan said.
“The speed to market and for us the ability to look at the open source world” was beneficial, Khan said. He noted creators can benefit from generative AI. For the most part, generative AI has been “industrial scale IP theft,” he said, referencing an article in the Wall Street Journal.
“All of this has been trained on data without consent. So for us, the blockchain provides” more permission, he said.
The future
Eventually, Alethea AI wants to create an arena for avatars, where it can really show off the emotive and express part of avatars with full-body animations, voice and lip-syncing. That’s not ready yet. You’ll be able to graduate to higher-fidelity agents. Khan also showed a demo of Donald Trump and what his avatar would look like and behave like.
Over time, you will be able to create an agent and then see what kind of earnings or rewards you can get by participating in the economy.
“What’s also really interesting is all of the activity that is happening on the blockchain is all transparent,” Khan said. “All of this is being tracked on the chain. As these fan passes or keys are being bought or sold. it becomes like this dynamic economy that’s emerging on the blockchain.”
He added, “The next phase of this is to evolve these agents into truly autonomous agents, where they can do transactions for you, they can buy and sell in-game items. You talk to them as NPCs but then they also have their own financial life.”