We always talk about the need for utility when it comes to the value of NFTs and the future of the technology. At this point, a consensus among NFT communities has emerged that the expectation of any project is to carry some “added value” beyond a profile pic jpeg. Unfortunately, this has lead to so many artists and NFT producers to consider “utility” as a sort of “add-on functionality requirement” to an otherwise ordinary generative art collection. What this ends up looking like in practice, is that the utility itself becomes a necessary second thought, a marketing tool by the team to promote the jpegs having an arbitrary set of extra perks to make collectors and community members feel like they’re getting something more for their purchase.

Whether it be some kind of airdropped supplemental tokens, access to certain VIP privileges, whitelists for more art, or perhaps an invite to an exclusive event - “utility” has become synonymous with “NFTs with benefits.” This has normalized “utility” being a secondary set of variables to the prime objective of selling an art collection.

Utility as the ends, not the means, to building quality digital communities

For NFTs to make serious breakthroughs into the mainstream, bringing adoption from all walks of life, the prime objective will need to address the needs of those who would otherwise not care about either jpeg art *or* these secondary variables. If “utility” were the focal point of purpose, and art became the secondary variable, the NFT experience would have an opportunity to transcend the bounds of the crypto-only space, and begin disrupting traditional technology in the fields of legal documentation, gaming, real estate, bills of lading - the sky truly is the limit.

“Tokenizing real world assets” has surfaced as the calling card of the NFT futurists, and certainly some of these prototype innovations have excited many, despite the early limitations and obstacles these pioneers have struggled with. Physical objects, (be it paper or pdfs stored on centralized servers) seem to be the standard vision for developers seeking to push the envelope. Web 3.0 offers a whole new universe of data preservation opportunities. Our tokenized objects living immutably on blockchains are assuredly a utility of value for institutional and personal efficiency and interoperability.

Who gets to own the new digital society, heritage, and economy of “us?”

However, this begs a new question. While the “things” in the world that can be tokenized are fairly quantifiable, and the value of representing their existence on distributed ledgers can be envisioned as a dataset that can be speculated on and queried for anyone who has access, what is much more difficult to quantify is our need to preserve and archive our beliefs, our yearnings, our cultures, our hopes and fears, and our collective selfish desire to project all of these values in an uncensored and immutable way. We attempt to do this all the time, by giving up this data to social media corporations that leverage it all for profit and pretend as though its value is ours to own and that it isn’t edited, manipulated, and repackaged by the Web 2.0 giants - absolutely free. In fact, we are willingly handing these corporations free labor - our lived data sets they would otherwise need to pay countless millions for to profile us and sell to big businesses that seek to sell us back their watered down, curated, commodified versions of our own desires.

What if we could own these desires and develop them as we see fit? What if we can decide how private they are and what kind of legacy we want to share online for the world to query - basically… forever? What if we want to preserve our cultures and life experiences, as filtered and edited as we choose, un-erasable, and not open to manipulation by those looking to squeeze these experiences for every last cent?

If NFTs were imbued with technology that brought them closer to representing our life experiences, however imperfectly, how much closer could we get to cataloging our own longing for a digitized immortality? How can we leave future generations more than just a simple account of our memes, emojis, and blog posts, but instead, a more accurate reflection of our passions, our character, and the ways in which we as individuals interacted with each other in communities?

A tokenized synthetic life experience, encoded with Artificial Intelligence technology, designed to learn from us, could be the kind of utility that would transcend being a marketing bullet point. It would have real, objectively purposeful utility. An NFT where the art or avatar exists to supplement us as beings, with all the dispositions and temperament that we choose to fill up that art as an embodiment of our wholeness.

The tools of digital autonomy are within our reach. It’s up to us to initiate contact and take control.

This is becoming possible with Alethea AI’s endeavor to bring “soul” and “mind” to the NFT “body” with iNFTs. Beyond the generative power of 10,000 layers of cute ape accessories, we can now leverage the generative powers of AI into our existing ERC-721 NFTs, through a groundbreaking protocol that fuses a “personality pod” with our favorite jpegs. Alethea’s “Noah’s Ark” can be used to evolve this iNFT to level up its personality traits and intelligence in a unique metaverse experience.

By merging our existing NFTs with these personality pod NFTs, an iNFT is born. We can create identity and psyche, develop personality traits and intellect, and level up their skills as an AI to communicate this wisdom and understanding through token rewards for engaging the iNFT. Without having to lock, wrap, swap, or stake our existing NFTs, we are able to AI-ify our PFPs in a non-custodial fashion. The framework of the personality pod is injected into the existing NFTs, so while transforming it into an iNFT, it leaves the ownership, usability, and open endedness for us to pursue its development freely and without control from Alethea.

The first 10,000 personality pods were sold exclusively on Opensea, and there’s currently a marketplace for purchasing our own. By merging the personality pod with an NFT, we not only own the new iNFT, but the personality pod that it was injected with. Currently, this process is irreversible, but developers are working to upgrade the technology, so in the future, we can choose to dismantle the fusion if we as the Alethea community vote to make it so.

Although only ERC-721s can currently be fused with the personality pod, the team at Alethea is working hard to bridge that gap to become chain/layer agnostic, as well as token standard agnostic. Their goal is to open doors for our iNFTs to exist in whatever metaverse is open to NFT token standards that they are merged with. A future where our AI-powered iNFTs can interact across a decentralized digital multiverse, carrying with it all of the traits they learn from our engagement.

Everything is at stake when it comes to how “we” will be digitally curated for future generations

Through this permissionless and decentralized medium and technology, we have an opportunity to utilize our aspirations to digitize our very being, immutably onto blockchains and into metaverses - as individuals and as communities. Humanity’s collective culture and intelligence now has a vehicle to become preserved as we see fit, on decentralized ledgers that can’t be sold by and for third parties that own the dystopian internet as we know it.

Collectively, we can not only democratically empower our iNFTs to create new utilities, socialize in incredibly unique ways, and shape decentralized economies of our own, we also have the opportunity to mold cornucopian reflections of ourselves and others for an enriched metaverse adventure in the now, and for our greatest of great grandchildren, making their communication with us a more fulfilling and timeless legacy to tap into.