The new frontier for collaborative storytelling.
images: depositphotos, warner bros discovery, nintendo, disney, netflix and peanuts | press release.
Brief:
What are NFT Characters.
How Artificial Intelligence can help us in building collaborative storytelling.
The brilliance of human creativity is incapable of becoming obsolete.
Have you ever imagined watching an interactive series where the actions and decisions of the characters are guided by you and your friends or thousands of people?
Something like this smells of science fiction for now, but it's getting each day closer to us each.
We started playing Pacman and Super Mario Bros. Then the consoles got one more control and Luigi appeared on the screen.
Now we can play with a friend!
With the internet, the interaction in games went online and not just with a friend, but with 5, 15, or, as in the success of Fortnite, up to 100 simultaneous players.
Parallel to this evolution, the graphical processing capacity of the consoles transformed our characters from ghostly polygonal blocks to finely detailed facial expressions. Virtual characters became capable of transmitting the nuances of the human heart and, since then, games make us laugh or cry. The border between gaming and storytelling is becoming less and less evident in a movement crowned today by the success of The Last of Us on HBO.
This, in itself, is already an incredible shift, but it seems that we are about to break a new frontier in the entertainment industry.
NFT Characters
This new upheaval begins to emerge with the arrival of NFT characters.
Yes. Characters like Mario, Mickey, Charlie Brown, or Joel Miller created and minted as NFTs, as happens with Profile Pictures today.
Thanks to blockchain technology, we can buy characters like these (or many of them).
This opens a new perspective on intellectual property that we haven't seen before. How about owning Donald Duck or SpongeBob, able to create commercial products with their characters or even create stories for them?
Does it seem cool to you? Me too!
And what if we seasoned this mixture with a little nitroglycerin?
Artificial Inteligence
With the improvement of its creative capabilities and interaction with human beings, Artificial Intelligence has finally become capable of CREATING.
It creates images, spreadsheets, poems and, yes, stories.
Of course, it doesn't reach human brilliance in their creations (at least for now).
But two features make AI charming:
The high-scale data collection and high-speed creation.
Nitroglycerin Pure:
By combining NFT characters, Artificial Intelligence, and the brilliance of human creativity, we can inaugurate a new mode of interactive stories.
Imagine a series where its characters are converted into NFTs and acquired by tens, thousands, or millions of people.
In each episode, new dilemmas and challenges are presented, as in traditional series.
People love to discuss it all until the next episode:
"He should have done that!"
"I can't believe she did that, I loved it!!!"
In the interactive series, AI may collect these reactions from people throughout the week. Under the guidance of highly creative human minds adding new challenges and dilemmas, the next episode can be organically created where each character responds to the reactions of its audience.
No one knows the outcome of each scene.
No one knows how it ends.
Anyone can get married or die, depending on the audience's behavior.
Each episode becomes a chopping block on Big Brother.
In this context, NFT characters cease to be individual creations and become living actors, with all the layers of complexity and contradictions that their audience can bring to them.
The stories can go increasingly immersive and realistic, as they are directly connected to their audience's desires, aspirations, and afflictions.
Such Stranger Things already happen
Collective creation is not exactly new.
In video games, we decide the fate of characters in interactive films like Heavy Rain. In the thriller by Quantic Dream developer, a father tries to rescue his kidnapped son from a psychopath by deciphering puzzles in origami:
“How far can you go to save the ones you love?
It was innovative, but here the drawings are pre-defined in the game and we only decide which path to take.
Netflix also innovated by collecting data from its audience and creating series to match its audience's desires. Blockbusters such as Stranger Things were finely written to bring to the people what they like the most.
Artificial intelligence, however, allows us to collect the audience's reactions and create like never before.
People have been, are, and will be crucial in any creative process.
Are there still many challenges to overcome?
Of course!
We need to "learn" how to create in this new reality (As professionals and machines).
Workforce Building:
Forget the idea of robots dominating the planet and all human beings on the sidelines begging for food. People have been, are, and will be crucial in any creative process.
The mere response of a machine to the desires of the public is not enough to create relevant stories. The toxic environment formed by people's animosity and the algorithms of social media is a good example of this.
In fact, it is the human mind that shines in this seemingly mechanized environment.
Good authors are vital in creating dilemmas worth experiencing for the public.
The audience goes from mere spectators to defining the destiny of their favorite character. Bar discussions about their favorite series become voices outcoming the story.
Telling stories has never been so collectively human. So it's time to learn how to create collectively everything we have done individually with brilliance until now.
Integration of Blockchain and AI Technologies with the Public:
For the success of this creative model, the public needs to massively adopt the use of NFTs and blockchain. And that still takes time.
We need to deal also with not user-friendly smart wallets, security against scams and people seeing AI as the new Terminator...
Does it seem like a too-hard journey for that?
Perhaps.
But we can overcome a great odyssey by splitting it into small challenges.
How about starting with animated series, weekly comic book editions, or a podcast series?
In smaller projects like these, we can reap the benefits of learning from small errors and feed ourselves with small victories.
Regardless of the path chosen, living in the dawn of this new creative era is like being in Hollywood in the 1930s.
A unique opportunity, full of surprises to be revealed.
Disclosure: The content for this article was sourced from Chat Artificial Intelligence GPT 3 | Open AI.
This post is the 02 of 04, written for the Bankless Academy Writing Cohort with Grant Nissly.
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