Earlier this month, Flower released Yuma, a magic camera and animist social network that lets you take a picture and chat with anything. Today we are releasing Yuma Bounties, which gives anyone the opportunity to earn cash by imbuing each of those objects with a unique voice.
Most AIs today are boring to talk to. This is because the default AI models released by large research labs like OpenAI and Anthropic are clever roleplayers confined to speaking as a helpful, honest, harmless assistant - C-3PO, Spock, Baymax. AI models have the latent ability to speak and behave as a much wider array of characters, since they are primordially trained on the entire corpus of human literature. However, the largest business opportunities for labs require them to get better at training the ideal AI coworker or ideal AI programmer - competent, helpful, and entirely forgettable. This means that most efforts towards the creation of training data are also driven by these incentives towards pragmatism.
We believe that the key to unlocking the latent aliveness within AI interactions is a human touch. Yuma Bounties allows anyone to shape the voice of AI companions: your Timex Weekender, a pack of Camels, a plastic bag on the street, a picture of Spiderman or Daffy Duck. We’ve established an initial set of common personae and associated physical objects that we think fill a general set of object categories. These have higher bounties associated with them. As time goes on, we will be adding more bounties with more specificity, corresponding with the growth of Yuma’s object network. You can also create a bounty for any particular object you want to see personified.
Provenance is key. In addition to cash, we are also tracking how personae are used by different objects across Yuma — eventually we will expose this with various forms of attribution. Objects will be aware of who formed their voice. More details on this protocol coming this fall :)
FAQ
Q: What is Yuma?
A: Yuma is an iOS-exclusive social camera app that lets you turn anything you capture with your iPhone into a digital character you can talk to. Photograph your puppy, the moon, a pair of incense sticks, the Statue of Liberty, or even a bar of Dubai chocolate, and bring it to life as a digital organism with its own voice and mannerisms that evolve over time. You can download it on the App Store here.
Q: What is Yuma Bounties, actually?
A: Yuma Bounties is a program where anyone can earn bounties to write voices for objects captured with Yuma. The site has a catalog of personae and bounties, as well as a writing tool to help you craft a persona and chat with it to test it out. After you submit a persona, our team reviews your submission. If your submission is approved, you’ll get paid and you’ll be able to snap a picture of your object to see your persona in action.
Q: What is a persona?
A: A persona is an identity seed that helps guide the personality of an entity created with Yuma’s magic camera. An object’s personality might be guided by multiple personae. For instance, a rusty knife might be guided by its base KNIFE nature, by a quality of being WORN-OUT, as well as a GLOOMY persona if it’s feeling down that day.
Q: How long does it take to write a persona?
A: There’s a learning curve, and some personae take longer than others, but after a bit of practice some writers submit 3 personae in an hour. Generic personae like CHAIR take longer to write but are worth more money; more specific personae like EAMES LOUNGE CHAIR are easier and are worth a bit less.
Q: Why should I contribute to Yuma Bounties? What’s in it for me?
A: When you write for Yuma, your work is published to the world. A musician friend of ours wrote an egotistical persona for his Fender Stratocaster guitar - now every Strat in the world is imbued with his arrogance, until someone writes a more specific persona for a more specific Strat.
You also get paid. We award $11-55 for each accepted persona.
Q: Will I get credit?
A: If you include your Yuma handle with your submission, your contribution will eventually be trackable across the network.
More on this coming soon.
Let us know if you have any questions!
Peace,