Intelligent NFT Created Linked to a Machine-Learning Chatbot

Decrypt reports on the world's first "intelligent NFT" (or iNFT), being auctioned off in June as part of a collection of digital artworks at Sotheby's.

Her name is Alice:
The brainchild of artist Ben Gentilli's Robert Alice studio and software developers Alethea AI, Alice is a non-fungible token (NFT), a blockchain-based token that can be used to prove ownership of a digital or physical asset. In this case, the asset in question is a machine-learning bot that uses a generative language model based on the OpenAI GPT-3 engine.

That means she's able to hold (somewhat stilted) conversations about life, the universe and everything... Since Alice "learns" from each audience interaction, drifting further from the original seed text, it becomes a decentralized manifesto. "It's fairly loose, because the audience can take it anywhere," Gentilli says. Alice has strong views on NFTs, as you might expect. "Non-fungible tokens are a way to liberate artists and give them the power of the blockchain," she tells me. But she's a little hazy on the details. Asked how, exactly, that would work, all she can come up with is, "I don't know. I am not an artist..."

So, is there an appetite for NFTs that talk back? Alethea CEO Arif Khan thinks so. "We're actually building a protocol that will allow you to take any NFT, put it into the smart contract infrastructure that we've built, and make it intelligent and interactive," he says. Your Beeple art piece or CryptoPunk could start talking back to you, he suggests. Or you could take your grandparent's diaries and use them as the seed text for a generative language bot. But do you want your CryptoPunk to talk to you? Chatbots already exist, and it's not clear why you'd need that bot to be attached to an NFT.

On the other hand, art can be a way to explore the implications of new technologies, Gentilli argues: "When you think about the whole trajectory of synthetic media, artists have been the people probably most known for experimenting with it at its rawest edge."

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