Alethea launches Fusion to combine NFTs, AI characters, and games

Alethea AI is launching Fusion, a platform that combines blockchain assets, intelligent AI characters, and gaming.

Fusion is a user-generated AI platform that will allow non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to be brought to life as iNFTs which are intelligent and interactive NFTs. It will enable new kinds of games, like intelligence battles between humans and NFT AI characters.

The first NFT community Alethea has partnered with is called Fame Lady Squad, which will be able to fuse 10,000 NFTs with distinct, unique and valuable AI personalities, said Arif Khan, CEO of Alethea AI, in an interview with GamesBeat.

Fame Lady avatars will no longer be merely static images, but will be able to create written content, recite poetry, generate video and music, and interact in real-time with their creators, ushering in a new generation of interactive blockchain-based avatars and assets.

“NFTs need not start and end with JPEGs; they don’t need to be stationary or static,” said Khan. “Instead, they can be engaging, interactive, and provide utility. By embedding these NFTs with cutting-edge AI tools, we give them superpowers to become useful participants in the emerging Metaverse.”

Fame Lady Squad NFTs will officially be able to fuse with Alethea’s collection of Personality Pods, which can be found on OpenSea. Once you Fuse a supported collection and a Personality Pod, you create an iNFT which is live on Noah’s Ark, Alethea’s Intelligent Metaverse.

An iNFT can be found in their carousel of characters, ready to offer AI Services. In the future, more NFT collections will be available for Fusion through a selection process that Alethea AI calls the iNFT Launchpad.

At present time, iNFTs are capable of offering three AI services that enable content creation and interactivity: Recite, Broadcast and Interact. Recite allows you to upload your own audio that the iNFT then lip syncs to. Broadcast allows you to create a custom video using the iNFT’s voice. Interact offers the unique experience of being able to converse in real-time with the iNFT, asking it questions from, “What is your favorite metaverse?” to “What is the meaning of life?”.

Future AI Services available will include generating art, writing and editing copy, creating music, and being interoperable and embodied in other metaverses.

“It is incredibly exciting to deliver increased utility for the Fame Lady Squad community. Fusion marks a historic shift, not only for Aletheans who already hold Personality Pods, but for both NFT natives and tourists to engage with assets like never before. We at Alethea are proud to pioneer this paradigm shift, and look forward to ushering in a new age of intelligent NFTs,” said Khan.

As iNFTs on Noah’s Ark, holders will be rewarded through ALI Utility Tokens based on how often other visitors to Noah’s Ark interact with said iNFT. Therefore, holders are earning in the Noah’s Ark ecosystem according to the popularity of the iNFT. At first, humans will be able to challenge AI characters in intelligence battles, but later iNFTs will be able to challenge iNFTs, Khan said.

This train-to-earn model is detailed in Alethea’s whitepaper. This is the first time an owner of an NFT can inject artificial intelligence technology into that NFT, creating an entirely new asset.

“At Fame Lady Squad, we aim to empower artists, creators and entrepreneurs in Web3. Fusion opens up a new opportunity for members of our community to increase the utility of their Fame Lady NFTs, enabling them to build a custom personality for their beloved NFT and create more content with this asset. We’re thrilled to be one of the first launch partners for Fusion, and can’t wait to see what our community creates,” said Bored Becky, in a statement.

In June 2021, Alethea AI teamed up with Robert Alice and Sotheby’s to auction off an intelligent NFT dubbed Alice. It garnered $500,000. It also launched a collection of 10,000 “personality pod” NFTs with OpenSea.

A live Fusion demo

The concept of Fusion is that you can pair one NFT with another on the blockchain, resulting in an iNFT superpower, said Ahmed Matyana, chief operating officer at Alethea AI, in an interview. Some of Alethea AI’s characters are pretrained AIs that behave like historical characters such as Cleopatra. You can have a chat with these characters, which use Alethea AI’s own proprietary AI technology such as in-house language models. It is geared toward creating characters with personalities. By pairing one known character, like Cleopatra, with a personality pod, you can create a new version of that character.

Alethea AI’s Noah’s Ark metaverse is where it executes the Fusion process. Once you fuse the iNFTs together, then you can engage in a battle of intelligence, so your character such as Alan Turing can have an intelligence battle with someone like Cleopatra. If your combined personality pod and your character win the battle, then you can win some rewards. I saw a demo where a Bored Ape character served as a host on Noah’s Ark to walk me through the Fusion process.

I chose the personality of a gamer and then Khan fused my gamer personality with the Alan Turing character, resulting in an iNFT. I could also choose the voice for the character. Then my character engaged in a voice-to-text debate with another character.

Our debate topic was “Do aliens exist?” So my Alan Turing character went up against Khan in that debate. Khan challenged one of Turing’s assertion by saying it was a fallacy of induction. It went on for a while like this, with Khan and Turing engaging in a verbal debate. Khan showed Turing’s position was inconsistent and so he won the intelligence battle, according to the AI judge in Alethea AI’s engine.

“It’s a product that will be improving over time,” Khan said. “There is a coherence score that enables the engine to get more robust as more data sets get developed. This language model is trained with iNFTs that are on-chain assets.”

Khan said that as more users enter the ecosystem and enjoy what the platform produces, the better the company’s datasets become.

“When they make the AI stronger, the protocol also gets stronger,” he said. “Because we are giving rewards out in a way that is positive to the network. We’re moving from the age of user-generated content and I believe we are entering an age of user-generated AI.”

In this age, users create their own AI characters and their own iNFTs. People will interact with these characters. Open AI is starting to push this in a different way with DALL-E, which uses AI to create art. That is something that Khan is looking into as well with Alethea AI.

The company has about 100 employees and it has raised $31.5 million through token sales.