A new era of synthetic media is coming, and Alethea AI aims to be an early bird at the sector’s forefront by combining artificial intelligence tech with Ethereum’s top DeFi “money lego” services to create innovative tools. That’s where the project’s new meme solution comes in.

On Monday, March 30th, Alethea AI — whose creators hail the platform as the “world’s first decentralized synthetic media marketplace” — unveiled Meme Pools, a so-called “no-loss content sponsoring” tool designed to provide content creators with a novel revenue model.

Backed by Ethereum smart contracts, these Meme Pools will allow users to crowdfund and direct the creation of AI-generated media and be rewarded for doing so. Specifically, the system works by users putting up a sum of Dai tokens to back a synthetic meme creator and those stablecoins being lent out on the DeFi lending dApp Compound so the interest can go to the creator.

This “no-loss” dynamic means users can withdraw all of their Dai from a Meme Pool whenever they please, at least after an initial cooldown period of 24 hours. Accordingly, these pools make it so that people don’t have to spend their own money to back a given meme creator.

Additionally, whenever a user puts Dai in a meme pool, they are rewarded with a “continuous stream of ALE Token rewards” that grant voting rights. These rights can be used to commission and direct the creation of new memes from creators.

New Tool in the Revenue Toolbox?

Content creators today enjoy a range of useful tools through which they can generate revenue streams. Most of these tools are mainstream and thus recognizable to many, but there are newer solutions like DeFi projects that are relatively unknown right now but that are already showing creators they don’t have to be limited by the status quo when it comes to revenue.

With that said, Alethea AI’s Meme Pools are positioned at the threshold of two rising arenas, AI and DeFi, that many folks simply haven’t wrapped their heads around yet. The niche factor means the project may struggle to gain early traction, but there’s no denying it points to new ways of monetizing content entirely.

Arif Khan, the CEO and co-founder of Alethea AI, said he was interested to see how the cryptoeconomy and its creators would approach the new tool:

“By combining AI-generated media with the innovations available to us in the DeFi ecosystem, we can marry two of the most promising technologies of our time. Being able to create a new source of income for the meme creators on our platform, while ensuring that our users do not incur a loss, makes us really excited to see how the overall crypto industry will respond to this new no-loss way of sponsoring content and whether other content creators will adopt this methodology.”

Unleash the Power of the Meme

To demonstrate the power of their new system, Alethea AI used a Meme Pool to create a synthetic video of Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin singing Pink Floyd’s classic hit, “Money.”

Just when I though the money printer go brrr meme couldn't get any better, @real_alethea's MemePool creates a deep fake video of @VitalikButerin singing Money by Pink Floyd.

💵💵💵#perfectionhttps://t.co/dJ7zEnn9tL — Camila Russo (@CamiRusso) March 30, 2020

It’s definitely trippy and provides a clear example of the kind of creations that Meme Pools may be powering in the future. For now, the project’s smart contracts are still on the Rinkeby testnet, but they are set to go live on the Ethereum mainnet in short order.

Over the long-term the Alethea AI team envisions companies will leverage Meme Pools to help boost their digital reaches, as the platform’s landing page predicts:

“People’s faces and voices are now composable due to advances in AI. Brands that effectively leverage this new whitespace will emerge as winners.”