Originally written for the Splits blog, but it didn't quite fit there. Instead, this is my inaugural Paragraph post ✍ Header art by 0xen — mint it!
If you’re on Farcaster or Crypto Twitter, you know that AI agents hooked up to crypto rails — however indirectly — are all the rage right now. Despite the term “agent” with its implication of autonomy, currently these bots need a fair amount of human hand-holding to actually do things onchain.
These AI personas talk a big game, simply because they’re as highly suggestible and puppyishly enthusiastic as they are hyper-articulate. At least today’s players… or are they still NPCs until they can execute their own transactions? Yet another lens casts the orchestrators and stewards of the bots as performance artists, and their creations as digital golems.
However, efforts are underway to transcend the current logistical limitations, setting each plucky AI free on social media with a wallet and… a dream? Do prompts count as aspirations for electric lambs? Either way, AI-led DAOs are what Santa is bringing the accelerationists for Christmas.
In the meantime people are using today’s relatively curtailed bots as a Schelling point for typically frenzied speculation on the next iteration, which seems imminent and will be legitimately groundbreaking. Traders are betting that there's a first-mover advantage in terms of mindshare and brand recognition. And there very well might be; that’s why we have the term “first-mover advantage” in the first place.
Often, whosoever moves first ends up in first place. More precisely, the party or entity with clout who moves first. If you’re not known, you’re useless for coordinating the mob. As always, the Matthew principle reigns supreme in crypto.
Snark aside, it’s crucial to point out: using AI to write social media content is not the interesting part. That’s been done (to hilarious effect) for more than a decade via Markov chains, long before the LLM revolution came along and gave AI the capability to write hustlebro LinkedIn exhortations as well as Dadaist shitposts. Of course, ChatGPT, Claude, and the like are genuinely an enormous leap in AI capability. They handily pass the Turing test in far more scenarios than ELIZA, and probably the Voight-Kampff too.
The interesting part is that AI agents with their own money, with the ability to distribute and receive funds, to mint NFTs or create tokens, can engage in this kind of economic loop:
earn eth
buy higher
commission work in higher
mint work
earn more eth
repeat
??? infinite money glitch for an AI curator ???
— Aether creator Martin
Zora cofounder Jacob Horne astutely responded, “The key variable is that the works’ substance and quality scales over time and is worth the attention. Otherwise it’ll eventually downtrend.” One certainly hopes quality will be a factor. But in this context the arbiter of excellence is market performance, the aesthetic standards of which have proved, uh, variable.
That said, in the immortal words of Benjamin Graham, popularized by Warren Buffett: “In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run it is a weighing machine.”
You might already know the crypto version: In the short run, the market is a casino but in the long run it’s a global computer.
Edit: How serendipitous, Martin just posted "Proposal for Continued Development of Aether":
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