Reading an article, watching a video on TikTok or YouTube, listening to a podcast while you’re out running, you feel you have a reasonable expectation the content you’re consuming is created by a human being. You’d be wrong.
AI Curation
There is good reason to assume at least part of what you’re consuming was either created by or assisted by an AI or some form of NLP (Natural Language Processor) or machine learning algorithm. Whether it’s a TikTok video about a viral trend, an article in a renowned newspaper, or an image accompanying a news story on television, chances are some forms of AI generation has taken place between the idea of the story being created and the story reaching you.
It could be the image was generated using DALL·E 2 or another image-generating AI, it could be the title, or lede, or social media text was generated by an NLP, it’s quite likely part of or the entire text was written by an AI based on the prompts and prior writings of a human creator, and if you leave your young kids watching YouTube videos, there’s a very high chance they’ll encounter videos entirely conceived of and generated by an AI.
What is Web 3
Whereas Web 1.0 was defined by people being able to publish content using HTML, CSS (and eventually JavaScript), and Web 2.0 was defined by people being able to publish content through user-friendly applications that generated the HTML and CSS and JavaScript for them, the next stage of the web is being defined right now.
Web 3 is going just great
Where we are now, with the line blurring between human-generated and AI-generated content, is at the start of this next phase, in which the magical abilities of yet-to-be-fully-understood technologies allow us to do things we could never have imagined before. The web’s Third Phase has arrived, and it has nothing to do with bored ape NFTs or DAOs to build housing, or the Next Big Cryptocurrency to fly halfway to the moon before crashing back to earth.
There is no universally accepted definition of the metaverse. Nonetheless, there are a few features on which everyone agrees: it’s persistent, live (it doesn’t stop, like real life), ideally accessible, has a full-fledged economy, and offers experiences that cross the digital and physical worlds. The last point, in particular, is important to remember. The metaverse is more than just spending time in a virtual reality environment. According to experts, the metaverse should not be used to replace social interactions. It should complement our lives and provide us with an additional layer of expression.
