At Nevermined, we leverage the power of NFT tech to add real utility to digital assets. That’s a broad vision, with massive applicability, we know.

So, sometimes we ask our in-house teams to hook up with interesting partners and build dApps that explore the possibilities of our tech stack. Practice what you preach. In this piece we want to put the spotlight on Arcadia, a truly stunning Generative Art app that saw the light of day when we threw our Web3 skills in a bucket and blended it with the AI genius of the Eden.Art collective.

Web3 = Wow3

Arcadia is a dApp that allows you to make AI-generated videos, with fair creator attribution. It was inspired by the current buzz that AI-text and video generating projects are getting, but we wanted to push the boundaries and move the fun of creating these images into the Web3 philosophy.

The visual element is ‘simple’: when you type in text prompts, Arcadia uses a text-to-video interpolation model that is hosted by Eden.art, the creative collective behind Abraham.ai and other innovative GAN models. This turns your words into images, which are then blended into an animation.

That in itself is stunning and a fun way to express creativity. But Arcadia adds two more unique functionalities.

First, the dApp attaches a story contract to each video. This means that everyone can contribute prompts in a sequential way. Each new prompt extends the story with 3 seconds of AI generated video.

On top of that, the creation of each scene is registered on-chain. Each contribution comes with provenance and immutable attribution. This could be the foundation for splitting rewards and it also opens the door for fair, collaborative storytelling.

How does that work from a tech point of view? You can see the details below, but the TLDR-version is: Arcadia uses an API gateway from Stable Diffusion, Solidity smart contracts and registers the rendered videos on IPFS.

In the AI corner: Eden.art and Stable Diffusion

In The Generative Arts ecosystem is based on people collecting a lot of image data, which are then used by world class AI experts to train models and create the AI tooling that are all the rage right now: style transfer, text-to-image, text-to-video and much more. The Eden.art collective sits atop this ecosystem and makes these art creation tools accessible to the user.

Their mission is to create a fully decentralized, open substrate for generative arts. Because Stable Diffusion is open source and decentralized, it becomes the natural environment for this mission to thrive.

Eden.art have also brought together experts and creatives that are genuinely interested in making the generative art space more open. A central point of the discussions has been about the ability to be fair to each contributor, and to acquire wealth (without necessarily being human).

So that’s where we threw Web3 into the bucket.

In the Web3 corner: Proof of Provenance

More often than not, a creative ‘end product’ is the result of efforts by different people at every stage of the creative process, whether they are scientists, artists, or even data providers.

At Nevermined, we know that Web3 is more than JPEGs on a blockchain. We believe that true value will come when assets are combined, remixed, built upon. That’s what we try to enable with our Nevermined tools: add utility to NFTs and digital assets.

In the case of Arcadia, the utility lies in:

• Making assets interoperable, by adding an NFT standard
• Adding provenance by registering each prompt/contribution
• Tokenize the output, so royalties can be added (relative to contribution)

To give you an example: for the RareEffect NFT expo in Lisbon, the team created interactive assets that were generated collaboratively and could be displayed on the event’s VJ cube.

In the future, we believe that using the Nevermined access functionalities, the community governance rules around usage of this technology, could become simpler due to the on-chain orchestration of the creative process.

How does the tech work and what’s next?

Conceptually, Arcadia adds a value attribution layer to the already existing Lerp from Eden.art.

To achieve that, we make sure that each generated video has the prompt creator metadata attached to it. We also create a smart contract that organizes and indexes the videos, allowing for an infinite interpolation of a collectively told story.

Arcadia uses a fully decentralized stack where the prompt requests are managed on chain through smart contracts and the provenance of the final result is in decentralized storage like IPFS.

The result is Proof of Provenance: we get a grasp on the different creators of the various building blocks that make up a certain story. This means we are able to attribute and fairly distribute any reward that is generated. We also ensure that the assets live on-chain, independent from any single player, and owned by the creator.

The initial feedback on this experiential art form has been very positive, so our next step is to start thinking about what forms of tokenomics and gamification we can plug into the Arcadia machine. We’re also looking at which features are relevant for the community of AI artists, when it comes to value attribution and decentralization.

Want to get involved with Nevermined Arcadia? Join our Discord here.

Article written by Cintia Aguiar Pinto for Nevermined in close collaboration with Dimitri De Jonghe. Huge shoutout to the entire Eden collective, Gene Kogan, Vanessa Rosa, Xander Steenbrugge, the Eden community and all people advancing the openness of AI technology.

About Nevermined

Nevermined builds developer tools and templates to unlock the next-level utility behind NFT technology. We believe that Web3 will deliver on its promise when any type of asset can be shared, discovered and built upon. With Nevermined you can inject your tokens and NFTs with Advanced Utilities.

If you would like to know more about our products or want to have a chat, please reach out to us via the website or in our Discord.

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Originally posted on 2023-01-19 on Medium.