Alethea AI launches blockchain-based synthetic media marketplace

Founded in 2019, Alethea AI is a Los-Angeles based AI production studio. The company is building a decentralized synthetic content network, that lets anyone create and monetize AI-generated media.

“AI-generated media is a powerful storytelling force multiplier,” Arif Khan, the CEO at Alethea AI. “The emergence and availability of these tools will transform the media landscape. How we respond to the new landscape, depends on how well informed our communities are.”

Khan founded Alethea to educate the world about deepfakes and the malicious use of AI-generated media. Deepfakes use a form of artificial intelligence called deep learning to make hyper-realistic fake events.

To illustrate the threat and potential of deepfakes, and “bearing in mind regulatory protections for Satirical content,” Alethea AI has created videos using the likenesses of Binance CEO, Changpeng Zhao (CZ), and Ethereum creator, Vitalik Buterin.

“With the rise of synthetic media and at-will deepfake creation tools, how will we learn to discern the truth?” Khan questions. "The democratization of AI tools to generate synthetic content will make the current standards of misinformation seem almost benign”

“Synthetic media is a nascent but fast-growing industry,” Khan says. “Other examples are virtual Instagram influencers such as Lil Miquela and digital customer experience identities built by companies such as Soul Machines.”

The Alethea AI Meme Pools enables a new financing model for synthetic media, combining algorithms for video and audio manipulation with a novel way of funding content creation.

The smart contracts powered revenue model lets users sponsor creatives by staking Dai (DAI). The staked Dai generates interest through the Compound.Finance protocol. The content creator who owns the meme pool keeps the interest generated by all of the staked Dai, while the users do not have to trust any third party and can unstake their Dai in a permissionless manner.

Users of the new Alethea AI marketplace are able to create and publish AI-generated characters using Alethea AI’s proprietary API. Users are able to monetize this content by fulfilling requests from buyers. Customers can book an AI-generated character built on the data of themself, a celebrity, or an influencer, or they can choose a 100% AI-generated identity.

“Synthetic media is a new medium that does not require humans to physically interact, which is crucial during the pandemic as movie studios are unable to produce new content due to quarantine restrictions,” says Khan. “We can now enable actors and their talent agencies to license out their face and voice data in a secure manner.”

To ensure the trustlessness of the system, and avoid the potential for contested origin controversies related to deepfakes, all synthetic content created on Alethea will be protected by the Oasis Labs privacy APIs.

Oasis Labs is a privacy-first software company that builds end-to-end data solutions on top of the Oasis Network. Founded in 2018 by Dawn Song, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, Oasis Labs is backed by investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, and Polychain.

Anne Fauvre-Willis, the Head of Marketing at Oasis Labs said, “Leveraging the Oasis Parcel API and underlying Oasis Network, Alethea’s future creators and network participants will be able to confidentially store data and transact with it. As Alethea’s marketplace continues to evolve and mature, we’re excited to support them and their groundbreaking work as part of our growing developer ecosystem.”