Alethea AI launched its emotive and expressive AIs on Coinbase’s BASE blockchain to bring AI agents to creators, consumers and businesses.
This user-friendly application brings the power of high-fidelity AIagents 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 Alethea’s proprietary Emote Engine.
The Emote Engine of Alethea powers the high-fidelity facial animations, body movements and generative AI capabilities 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 AI 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.
It doesn’t have to be about you. Creators can also use the platform to customize their own anime-style or realistic character.
“You can create your own 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 friends.”
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 as it can create a path around the gatekeepers.
Besides real-time interactivity and rapid creation of AI agents, through the novel integration of blockchain-based smart contracts, creators can incentivize engagement and nurture a vibrant community around their AI 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 AI agents are on the BASE blockchain, gas transactions are significantly lower, leading to greater interactions and higher monetization possibilities for Creators. These AI agents can also be deployed easily in gaming and metaverse environments, Khan said.
How the avatars can work
The company is showing off its 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 Alethea 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. Using the blockchain, fans could theoretically purchase a fan pass for some kind of Dean transaction, with my permission.
They could also create interactions with my avatar, where Dean Takahashi the avatar is a poet. I could be a content creator and create a selfie of me writing in my journal. It could take samples of my corpus of my writing. It could be embedded on a Dean fan website or integrated into gaming environments.
“You can generate multimedia generative AI experiences,” Khan said.
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 agents. People have created different satirical agents and different enemy agents and different characters,” 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 IP violation, anything that is negative, we are using the community to incentivize and find things that they report and we take it down.”
Differentiation
One of the goals is to distinguish these avatars from other chatbots with the high-fidelity nature of the likenesses, emotions and expressions.
“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 will be open and monetization will favor creators and be fairly implemented through the transparency of the blockchain.
“We actually allow you to 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 almost three years ago now, working with Open AI on GPT.
“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. Or sometimes spamming is just endless abundance. 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.”