As different visions of the future digital world known as the Metaverse emerge, what role will AI play in it?

The Metaverse has become one of the hottest technology and socioeconomic topic. Combining different technologies like VR, 3D animation, blockchain and many others, lots of companies are already working on creating services for this new digital world. Even tech giant Facebook changed its name to Meta, demonstrating that the Metaverse is truly targeting to become the next big mainstream technology.

While a lot has been said about the role of blockchain in the Metaverse, thanks in part to the big NFT hype, I was wondering what was being said about the intersection of the Metaverse and AI. But first, let’s try to answer the question “what is the Metaverse?” or at least, try to point out several visions about it.

The Metaverse is the distant evolution of Web3. In its most complete form, it will be a series of decentralized, interconnected virtual worlds with a fully functioning economy where people can do just about anything they can do in the physical world.

AI as a Creative Partner

The latest Natural Language Processing (NLP) models (e.g. GPT-3 and others) have opened the door to use AI as a creative partner, generating creative writing based on user inputs (you can read my full article here about GPT-3, priming and prompt engineering).

But not only can AI generate creative writing, but also realistic images from text descriptions or even from very simple drawings. That is the case of technologies like OpenAI’s DALL-E or NVIDIA’s GauGAN2.

Smart Hyper-personalized Games, Experiences, Education and Welfare
And we finally get the last layer of the Metaverse, the Experience one. Building on every single layer presented in this article, and exploiting the capabilities AI offers, the goal is to create unique digital experiences for each user of the Metaverse. We can of course add additional features for each one of the proposed scenarios, as follows:
Intelligent difficulty modes adjustments for gaming, based on the player’s dexterity.
These are only some ideas about how AI can contribute to build differential and inclusive experiences in the Metaverse. We are only scratching the surface, and we will see lots of creative use cases in the future. In a recent poll I shared with my twitter followers, only 2 out of 10 thought that the Web3 will be more inclusive than Web2. We should prove the other 8 wrong by making the next web a safer, more inclusive space for everyone.