AI is the Key to Unlocking the Vision of the Metaverse

By Ben Goertzel, CEO, SingularityNET 

The metaverse’s booming popularity is reflected in its market size, which is expected to grow from $100.27B in 2022 to $1,527.55B by 2029. New projects are being launched all the time. However, how many of these new projects are capable of achieving the vision of the metaverse?  

Why AI is the Key to Unlocking the Metaverse

Many organizations are dipping their toes into the metaverse for the first time, experimenting with projects that combine traditional gaming with virtual reality. Beat Saber, for example, is commonly referred to as a VR cross over between Star Wars and Guitar Hero.   

These gaming projects do not reflect a true metaverse – a digital world parallel to our own where participants can take part in diverse social, economic, entertainment and artistic activities in a variety of self-organized groupings and environments. In fact, we’re still developing the technology required – metaverse booster Mark Zuckerberg suggests we may not see a true metaverse until 2036, and even if radical breakthroughs accelerate this, it’s still certainly years away. 

Something Zuckerberg picked up on early, that the majority of entrants from the crypto world missed, is that artificial intelligence is required to create a true metaverse – which is why Meta have developed an AI supercomputer. But how will AI help create a true metaverse?  

Bringing life to the early metaverse  

With over 160 companies developing their own digital worlds, early adopters will find themselves with a choice to make – ‘what world is right for me?’ Having this choice is great on the surface, as users will be able to pick a world relevant to their interests. However, the result of users filtering out into their desired scape is that each individual metaverse will be sparsely populated in the early days.  

Entering the metaverse for the first time is always going to be an exciting experience, but users won’t stick around if there’s nobody else there to interact with. AI-driven non-player characters and AI-powered content creation tools can help remedy this issue, turning a metaversal ghost town into a scintillating hotbed of digital activity.   

AI will bring life to the metaverse, creating lively worlds that will entice more and more people to move from spectators to users. Over time, AI will shift into a different role, forming a key and implicit part of metaverse infrastructure.   

AI-driven tour guides 

With all the metaverse projects in development, users will suffer from choice paralysis, struggling to pick one world to stick to. They will require the choice to move from metaverse to metaverse seamlessly.  

This will not be extremely hard to achieve. Blockchain technology already allows data to be moved from place to place with ease through sharding, ledgerless chains and other techniques. This technology can be improved upon to allow users to be transported between worlds, retaining all their assets, such as outfit choice, from each world.  

Again, freedom of choice is great, but each time a user switches to a new metaverse, they will need an introduction. This requirement is compounded by first time users who will require a complete overview of the metaverse. With 25% of people expected to be using the metaverse daily by 2026, this is not a task that humans can achieve alone.  

Instead, AI can be used to create digital tour guides – providing a one to one introduction to each user, providing all the required information of each world.  

Creating unique immersive content  

The most impactful change AI will bring to the metaverse is its world-building capabilities. Developers will be able to use AI to generate bespoke scenarios based on a few inputs from users, which can then be transferred to VR technology, creating a complete user experience.  

As more and more users generate experiences, the AI technology will improve upon itself, autonomously generating new scenarios outside of developer creation. Eventually, AI will be directed by an interactive storytelling interface, generating entirely unique scenarios from each input – an immersive content creation tool.  

These use cases require AI to work in tandem with VR and blockchain, and while AI is still in development, hope lies in the masses of funding that is entering the metaverse space. Time to develop AI will be drastically decreased and soon we may see a metaverse project that achieves the true vision of the metaverse. 

Ben Goertzel is the CEO and founder of the SingularityNET Foundation. He is one of the world’s foremost experts in artificial general intelligence, a subfield of AI oriented toward creating thinking machines with general cognitive capability at the human level and beyond.

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