I remember years ago around the time I first discovered and started using Google that there was a television interview with a person who sold themselves as a “search expert”.

Essentially you’d pay this person to use Google on your behalf because they knew how to find what you were looking for with the engine.

Looking back it did make me laugh why anyone would do this — of course, it’s quite simple — people are lazy and don’t want to learn for themselves.

Fast forward to today though and there’s an interesting parallel in this story between Google in 1998 and people using Midjourney or DALL-E in 2022.

David Clark-Joseph said that AI will enable tools for the #web3 and #metaverse creator economy, people will be able to envision all sorts fast and easily. I argued that if you’re using AI then the output is not your vision and act of creation but a machine’s.

However.

It’s the mastery of the input that dictates what that output becomes and that’s the real skill. Like the person 20 years ago who knew how to wrangle a search engine for the best and most accurate results, it’ll be the creators who do exactly the same thing with AI-driven tools that will define what art can be.

Users who create with simple terms and limited imagination will get the same feedback from these tools. Creators who can wield prompts as well as an articulate author will clean up.

And this will be true for all assets that populate worlds and experiences in the metaverse created by AI-driven tools. The richer and more complex the demand the more immersive and imaginative those worlds will become.

I suspect that one day there will be a tool that will create entire virtual worlds from scratch using just a few choice words and world builders can choose to let people experience these as is or reshape the output as they wish.

There are already startups pivoting to be the go-to agency to build metaverse and virtual experiences for brands but soon even they’ll be under threat from creators who can use AI to build worlds faster and more imaginative.

And that’s going to be far more exciting than generative NFT art.