The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Web3 🤖
Hey friends!
It’s time for a little ✨experiment ✨
Say this with us: Mattress. Mattress. Mattress.
Okay, now in an hour we want you to go look at your social media accounts and see if Big Brother was listening hard enough to get some Nectar and Casper ads queued up in your feed. And if it does, don’t blame us! Blame the Artificial Intelligence teams at your favorite tech giants for their ability to get direct access to your data and use it to sell you just about anything your heart desires (or in this case, anything you were asked to say by two Web3 nerds on the internet LOL).Â
This concept of being able to directly target consumers based on learned behavior is not unfamiliar to most of us. It’s the reason Kendall’s explore page is full of brownies and cookies as an ode to her Crumbl obsession, and why Chad’s is full of basketball mixtapes and the corn kid. Everything is tailored to you. This is because of Artificial Intelligence (AI)–a prime driver of targeting in Web2 (our current internet). It’s the reason every time you get on Tiktok, your explore page feels perfectly curated. It’s the reason why Meta recommends people you may know, and the reason why Twitter recommend’s tweets from people you don’t follow onto your feed now.Â
This week, we’re diving into what AI is and why it’s going to be interesting to follow as we transition from web2 to web3.Â
What is AI?
As we mentioned above, AI stands for Artificial Intelligence. In even simpler terms, AI is the ability for a computer to think and learn. We, engineers and data scientists, program computers to perform tasks that can be typically done by humans like language, problem solving, and even learning. The learning piece is what sticks - AI allows for programs and algorithms to adapt, learn from its mistakes and successes, and improve over time. *Light bulb for figuring out why the TikTok algorithm knows us so well*
And there are benefits to having that perfectly curated experience:
Discovery: finding content that meets the users needs while considering the important context for that userÂ
Matching: using complex algorithms, huge sets of data, and computational infrastructure to pairing content to users, friends to one another, and even advertisers to buyers Â
Filtering: removing the content that doesn’t belong for specific reasons (e.g., propaganda, misinformation, African princes looking for money)Â
But like every good thing, it also has its bad, and some of these downsides are:
No privacy: when AI is able to know you this well through algorithms and programs, you have to wonder how your information is protected (or not)
No returns: the AI is using your data to help curate a stream of ads or better itself to improve the experience for everyone, without giving you a slice of the pie
Not human: as close as the AI can get to perfectly completing human tasks, it will never be one of us - not creating any room for creativity or emotionsÂ
So, what role does AI have in web3?
AI has been successful because of the ability it has to leverage large amounts of data about you to successfully target you and keep you using the apps–for better or for worse. However, the reason it’s become a core part of our online experience is the same reason that raises concerns about its role in a decentralized world.Â
People’s desire to quickly find and access content that’s relevant to their needs is not going anywhere. In fact, we believe that there could be an even greater opportunity for AI technology to help consumers discover and engage with communities in web3 through NFTs and DAOs.Â
On the other hand, what will likely have to adjust is the way entities access data from people. In web3, the everyday person will ideally be able to more effectively own and profit off of the data that has historically been owned and sold by the tech giants.Â
What does this mean for you?
When we think about AI, we can’t ignore all the technological advancements its brought us (e.g., self-driving cars, automated investing apps, healthcare management, etc.). And it’s safe to say that we’ve gotten pretty comfortable with these extremely curated online experiences; however, the AI programs we’ve leveraged today will need to be adapted for a Web3 world. The builders who ultimately discover ways to give people ownership over their own data to then be leveraged by AI will win. What our current AI systems should show us is that if this is just the tip of the ice berg, sheeeeeesh we may see some crazy things with AI in the near future!Â
Kendall & Chad - out!