The best part of the Metaverse will be the people who inhabit and create inside it. But as AI content generators grow more popular, we’ll see this technology increasingly utilized.
1. Automated Environments
When you play The Sims you get to control the lives of the virtual characters, but if you sit back and simply do nothing, the virtual people and world carry on without your commands. Throughout history humans have tried to create predictable systems. We want to control and mold our environments, but the real world still has systems outside of ourselves. We don’t control the weather for instance. Artificial intelligence will be used to create and maintain digital environments. Walking through a procedurally-generated forests complete with artificial sounds alongside various animals flying and crawling around without your instruction allow people to avoid the stress of constant maintenance rather than experience.
2. Creation Tools
By now, the average person is aware of AI generated artwork by machine learning models like Midjourney or Diffusion. Less people are aware of the text-to-3D programs or text-to-audio or Meta’s new text-to-video. Not to mention text generation itself (blog posts, email marketing, etc) with programs like Jasper.
The Metaverse is an immersive digital world. Right now, it can be tedious to build 3D objects, and downright frustrating if you’re an average person. Being able to build your virtual home by just talking or typing out what you want would be great for the average user.
3. Dead People and NPCs
Many episodes of the show Black Mirror deal with the concept of digital consciousness. Digital copies of ourselves that outlive us after we die. While the Metaverse probably won’t be exactly in line with the dead internet theory, we might have several Metaverse citizens who are simply uploaded consciousness of those we’ve left behind in the physical world. The AI can also generate NPCs (non-playable characters) that could help ease our boredom in empty worlds or act as a very patient tour guide of certain worlds. Virtual assistants will become ubiquitous.
4. User behavior reports and analytics
Many won’t be happy about this use case, but corporations definitely will be. This could offer security or it can be used to serve up more in-world ads and product placement to the general population. It can also customize user experiences based on interests.
Tracking tools for the metaverse would help access a goldmine for advertisers to learn what users want and do over time. Context-aware recommendations and product placement would be increasingly common.