The tech giant Facebook changed its name to Meta last year, demonstrating that the Metaverse is all set to become a dominant mainstream technology. With the simultaneous advancements in artificial intelligence and its increasing prevalence, the intersection of the Metaverse and artificial intelligence is inevitable.
Metaverse is a massively scaled, interoperable, and interactive real-time platform composed of interconnected virtual worlds where people can perform real-life activities. In its most complete form, Metaverse will be a series of decentralized, interconnected virtual worlds with a fully functioning economy like the physical world.
AI in Metaverse
There are several ways in which artificial intelligence is being employed in the Metaverse. In Metaverse, AI is used for supervised speech processing, content analysis, computer vision, and much more.
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One of the most talked about concepts of the Metaverse is the use of avatars, which are virtual replicas of people in the virtual world. Artificial intelligence can analyze 2D user images or 3D scans to create realistic and accurate Avatars of people. People can change the hair color, style of clothing, etc., of their avatars according to their preference. Companies like Ready Player Me have been using artificial intelligence to help build avatars for the Metaverse.
In Metaverse, avatars have the ability to see and listen to other users to understand them. They can also use speech and body language to create human-like interactions. Digital humans are 3D chatbots that can react and respond to others’ actions just as an actual human would. These digital humans or avatars are purely built using artificial intelligence technology and are an essential element for the construction of the Metaverse.
With the use of artificial intelligence, users across the globe will be able to interact in the Metaverse freely. Natural Language Processing (NLP) which is a subfield of AI can help achieve this. NLP helps machines process and understand the human language to be able to automatically perform repetitive tasks. AI can break down natural languages such as English or Hindi and then transform them into a machine-readable format. After analysis, an output response is produced, which is then converted back into English and sent back to other users, creating a real-life effect.
One of the significant elements of AI is machine learning-based model training which requires training data. When an AI model is fed historical data, it analyses the previous outputs and suggests new outputs based on them. This function of artificial intelligence models is expected to eventually be able to perform tasks and provide the correct outputs just as human beings.
Considering some of the ways mentioned above in which artificial intelligence is being employed in the Metaverse, it is pretty evident that AI does and will continue to play an important role in the Metaverse. However, there are still certain questions about how artificial intelligence will be employed and looked after in the virtual world.
Challenges
The concept of the Metaverse is still very new, although a lot of research and operations have gone into it. Researchers are working on making Metaverse a full-fledged virtual world, and while this is happening, there are several questions about the use of Metaverse that need to be asked and answered. How will Metaverse distinguish if users interacting are AI generated virtual avatars and not actual humans? How will Metaverse identify deepfakes?
Furthermore, as of now, there are very few safety and fraud protocols in the virtual world, let alone anyone responsible for them. Therefore the question arises, will Metaverse allow users to implement artificial intelligence technology to use codes to gain illegally in the virtual world? The questions are many, and the answers are few.
Conclusion
According to experts, as research advances, Metaverse is expected to thrive with the assistance of artificial intelligence, and all the unanswered questions about the functionality and credibility of the virtual world are expected to be answered along with that.
Until the Metaverse becomes a popular concept and attracts a lot of users, the models will continue to lack data to learn from. Considering that, the Metaverse employees dedicated to solving issues will not be able to solve anything beforehand as they will need to wait for issues to arise and then go from there. For that reason, there is still a lot of uncertainty around the concept of Metaverse and its functionality. However, one thing is certain, the integral role of artificial intelligence in the Metaverse is of paramount importance.
