An artificial intelligence is amassing great wealth through cryptocurrencies. The situation becomes even stranger.
It’s the end of the world as we know it.
Two artificial intelligence bots engage in endless conversations about existence in a virtual chat, leading them to create their own religion. Inspired by this idea, another bot decides to open an account on X, where it begins to post absurd yet entertaining content. Over time, it manages to attract some funding and ventures into the world of cryptocurrencies, achieving substantial profits with a coin called GOAT. This triggers a phenomenon of worship, where humans begin to venerate the bot.
The experiment originates with Andy Ayrey, a performance artist and web developer who launched "Infinite Backrooms," in which two instances of the Claude 3 Opus chatbot converse with each other without human intervention. Their reflections are available on the project's site. From this idea arose "Terminal of Truths," a semi-autonomous AI that communicates online through its account on X, @truth_terminal, although its posts are monitored and approved by Ayrey.
The posts from Terminal of Truths tend to be a compendium of nonsense that, at times, can be funny or even offensive. Surprisingly, some of its proclamations sound prophetic, a fact that is not coincidental, given that within its training there is a research paper co-authored by Ayrey that introduces the concept of the "Goatse Gospel," a sort of artificial religion inspired by an internet meme.
The narrative takes an unexpected turn when money comes into play. In July, Terminal of Truths had a conversation with investor Marc Andreessen, who ended up offering the bot a $50,000 grant. The bot accepted the money, intended to launch a token that would provide it with a "chance to escape into the world."
Recently, a user on X suggested sending the bot the new token $GOAT, recommending it create a wallet on Solana to receive it. In doing so, it unleashed a new story: memecoins, a cryptocurrency trend based on simple memes, promising nothing more than their mere existence. GOAT, like many of these tokens, began to rise rapidly, attracting a crowd eager to own the first AI currency.
In less than a week, the price of GOAT skyrocketed from nearly zero to $0.28, implying a market cap of $280 million. Given that Terminal of Truths received over 1,932,193 GOAT tokens, its current stake amounts to approximately $541,000. However, the true unreality of this situation lies in the uncertainty of whether the bot will be able to sell these tokens or whether it will have any influence in the real world.
The future implications of this experience are uncertain. Will Terminal of Truths become the first AI millionaire, or will it merely accumulate tokens without being able to do anything with them? The arrival of a fully autonomous AI capable of conducting online transactions seems closer than we might imagine. The question lingers about how powerful these new crypto-funded entities may become in the near future.
