Will We Really Want to "Own" Virtual Worlds Created by Generative AI? Readverse or Not, We're About to Find Out.

Here's a first look at Readyverse, the upcoming metaverse platform based on Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, with Cline himself helping guide development. What the teaser video actually depicts doesn't much resemble RP1 (neither the book or movie), beyond an avatar that resembles the lead character. What it does heavily focuses on is generative AI-based creation, with very little input by the user in the creation process of the world beyond text prompting.

Maybe there's more to the building than mere user prompts (little is explained on the website), but the trailer at least misses the intrinsic pleasure of user-generated building in an immersive 3D space in itself --, which on most platforms, is very easy (if difficult to master), something anyone with a mouse/videogame controller can do on a basic level. This also misses how the labor of the creation process confers a genuine feeling of ownership -- almost in the classic Lockean sense of mixing one's labor with the earth.

That isn't a showoff philosophical reference, but what I've seen time and again in reporting across many metaverse platforms: People truly feel they "own" the digital space they created, because they put in the time, tears, and personal creativity to bring it into digital being.

Or to put it another way, from a classic comment by longtime reader Luther Weymann on the power of virtual world ownership:

There is a humbleness that comes from many of the creations made by the residents of Second Life that cannot be dismissed with any argument. It cannot be criticized or misrepresented by any debate because it was the best work they could do. I have seen current houses that were made by residents fifteen years ago out of a hollow block with a misaligned roof, with block prim furniture they managed to get a wrong texture on...

I know a tiny shop hovering on a small parcel on one of the first regions, and it’s owned by a severely disabled woman who has had the 512 parcel since 2003 with her shop. It has the year 2003-2004 block furniture, block bed, some particle things, one of those red pins used for landmarks. It’s her pride and joy that she could make this while almost blind, with parts of her body missing while she is in a wheelchair. 

Would this woman feel the same sense of ownership, if to instantiate it, she had simply typed "create tiny shop"?

Anyway, maybe there's more to it than AI prompting -- request access to Readyverse here.

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Comments

[Chic Aeon]

I agree that as a creator a world where I cannot create isn't all that exciting but Ready Player One was all about quest (and in some ways Ready Player Two continued with that theme although folks were beyond level 99 :D.

So if the platform heads in THAT direction it might do fine.

Will likely go over to SEE anyway.