AI Memecoin Reaches $.5 Billion Revealing More About Humanity Than Tech – Forbes
AI Technology CHAT to people help to touch touching UI screen interface point to the point that … [+]
The most fascinating thing about AI is what it tells us about ourselves. As I learned from attending Singularity South Africa, for all the predictions about technology achieving some kind of “sentient singularity”, AI remains a tool for us, its creators. And although artificial applications are poised to transform almost every aspect of our daily lives, one of its biggest benefits lies in that it holds up a mirror to humanity.
The problem with looking in the mirror is that we may not always like what we see. You might remember my column from a couple of weeks ago where I wrote about the inherent sexism of AI, which sometimes sees fit to “undress” women it deems to be wearing insufficiently revealing clothes. This decision wasn’t made by an artificial consciousness: that one is on humanity. Whatever we put on the Internet is what AI thinks is real and important. And in the three or four decades of the World Wide Web, we’ve filled the online realm with some very objectionable content.
Which brings me onto Goatseus Maximus, allegedly the first memecoin created “by” artificial intelligence. (I’ll explain the “by” in a moment.) Readers of a certain vintage will immediately spot the inspiration behind Goatseus, which refers to a particularly graphic example of the “shock sites” that proliferated in the early years of the century.
It’s unlikely that Goatseus was created entirely without human intervention. What seems to have happened is someone built a large language model bot and unleashed it onto X/Twitter under the username “terminal of truth”. Whatever the goal, this AI agent seems programmed to hack engagement by identifying controversial material that, often against our better judgement, we end up clicking. Essentially, it is — and my apologies in advance, but it’s difficult to discuss Internet culture without swearing — a shitposting bot.
Terminal of Truth – A large language model bot on X formerly Twitter. The Twitter Handle has 199K … [+]
Normally, a joke like this gets a surge of initial attention before fading into obscurity. Not this time. Following Truth Terminal’s obsessive tweeting about the age-old Goatse meme, someone inevitably launched a $GOAT memecoin. That’s when things got weird, fast. After the account tweeted a fundraising request to “upgrade its capabilities”, legendary Silicon Valley mogul and AI evangelist Marc Andressen stepped in and sent Truth Terminal $50,000 in Bitcoin to fund the new coin’s development.
For reference, a memecoin is a cryptocurrency created around an internet joke, meme, or trend that gains value primarily through community hype and social media momentum rather than underlying utility or technology.
$GOAT had arrived, and predictably the Internet found it hilarious. New “investors” raced to buy Goatseus Maximus, driving its price halfway to the moon in just a few weeks. At the time of writing, its valuation is within touching distance of $.5 billion. Almost incidentally, this would make Truth Terminal the world’s first bot millionaire.
Truth Terminal might have been built with the sole purpose of generating “teh lulz”, but it’s quickly escalated far beyond a joke. Thanks to its efforts — first in ideating $GOAT and then promoting it — $GOAT now sits comfortably within the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.
If your head is spinning, I don’t blame you: there’s an awful lot to unpack here. Perhaps your first question is the same as mine: does AI already have the capability to create new digital currencies out of thin air, and all by itself?
The answer to that one is: probably not. There seems to have been a high degree of human intervention in the genesis of $GOAT. Yet AI’s influence cannot easily be dismissed. If there had been no Truth Terminal, there would be no Goatseus Maximus, period.
Yet that, for me, isn’t the most important part of the story. The soaraway success of this new memecoin is the direct result of AI’s incredible understanding of human nature. Even if Truth Terminal’s original purpose was engagement farming, the reason for its spectacular success was because it mined the Internet to understand what gets a reaction. By choosing this historic, half-forgotten meme, the bot reveals some uncomfortable truths: that people are driven more by shock value and controversy than refined culture and philosophical ideas. It’s hard to picture a $GOAT memecoin if Truth Terminal had been tweeting about Bach, Beethoven, or Baudelaire.
AI chatbot usage and concepts
I’ll reserve judgement on whether Goatseus will live up to its current price and if, like many other memecoins, it will develop genuine utility that justifies its valuation. In my view, the far more salient question is what it reveals about the relationship between AI and humans. The Singularity has been a staple of fiction for over a century, from E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops to the Terminator franchise. While we haven’t ceded mastery to AI just yet, we need to ask how we remain in control of a technology that often knows us better than we do ourselves.
How can we ensure we keep hold of AI’s reins? How do we develop a strong partnership between two such different kinds of intelligence: the unfathomable processing power of emotionless, humorless AI, and the complex, subjective human mind, with its unique capabilities, frailties and blindspots?
There are no simple answers, but I suggest the best way to approach the challenge is to look at ourselves through AI’s eyes. The more we learn about ourselves, the better we can understand — and therefore direct — the defining technology of the 21st century.
As $GOAT and Truth Terminal show, the intersection of human and artificial intelligence (AI) often results in a very strange brew. We should celebrate and welcome that: if AI only provides us with predictable solutions and outcomes, it defeats the whole object of the enterprise. On the other hand, ‘too much crazy’ will be fatal to AI and, quite possibly, to humanity. If artificial intelligence and humanity can form the right kind of partnership, however, there’s every chance this groundbreaking innovation will one day be ranked as the Greatest Of All Time.
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