AI Will 'Accelerate' the Metaverse, Empower Creators: The Sandbox Co-Founder

The use of artificial intelligence, or AI, may speed up the pace at which original work is created in the metaverse, said Sebastian Borget, co-founder of The Sandbox and a speaker at Consensus 2023.

“What used to take days before, from ideation and conception, can now take just a matter of seconds,” Borget told CoinDesk TV’s “First Mover” on Thursday. AI will “accelerate and empower even more creators,” he said.

The Sandbox, a culture and entertainment platform, is a user-generated and virtual gaming tool where users can build, own and sell their gaming experiences. The Hong Kong-based platform’s Game Client was installed over 1.3 million times last year, and has a digital presence in countries including Japan, China, Dubai and Saudi Arabia, Borget said.

AI has garnered widespread attention. Some of its use cases, including ChatGPT’s text generator, have been met with warm and not so warm reactions. In March, for example, Neal Stephenson, author of “Snow Crash,” a science-fiction classic novel where he coined the term “metaverse,” said that AI in general, and platforms like ChatGPT specifically, were not “at all interesting” to him.

Nonetheless, Borget said AI is one of the systems that could spur the growth of the metaverse. The technology removes the need to create every aspect of an environment or an avatar character, he said. AI can help “generate and populate the experiences that you create much faster,” he added.

AI can be leveraged by creators as a way to make the metaverse “more full of life, fun to play, creative and inclusive overall,” Borget said.

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