Mark Zuckerberg has described Artificial Intelligence as “the key to unlocking the Metaverse”.
In a live-streamed demonstration, he created a basic virtual world using the AI feature Builder Bot.
He also announced plans to develop a universal speech translator.
“The ability to communicate with anyone in any language is a superpower that was dreamt of forever,” he said.
Builder Bot was part of Meta’s CAIRaoke project to improve AI assistants and allow “AI to see the world from our experience as people entered virtual reality with the help of headsets or glasses,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.
The AI used in Metaverse is promised to respect privacy and be transparent and responsible.
Facebook has been investing in AI for the past 10 years and has one of the world’s leading experts, Yann LeCun as its head of AI.
In January it announced that it had built a new AI supercomputer that aims to be the fastest in the world when completed in mid-2022.
Meta plans to hire 10,000 people in Europe to help develop the Metaverse and people are excited about it.
However, critics have asked whether big corporations should be allowed to dominate the creation of such worlds – and how safe users would be.
One of Facebook’s earliest investors, Roger McNamee, told BBC News. “the company should be prevented from creating a “dystopian” Metaverse, given how its social network had failed to keep user data private or avoid misinformation and hate speech.”
Meta chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth admitted the Metaverse “would be much harder to moderate than existing digital platforms, especially given its long-term goal of lots of companies interacting in the same space.”
But it is promised that the users will control their space.
In some instances, women were harassed. As a corrective measure, a Personal Boundary was incorporated in Meta to protect avatars from “unwanted interactions”.