“Threshold of Reflection” – a work produced by Botto.
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Generational AI is making a huge impact across industries and services finances Down human resources and technology spending growing fast.
The art world is no different – some artists take advantage of this help generate workand others are shocked by his capabilities.
Now a new AI “artist” is making waves, raising major questions about the nature of art, its creation and ownership.
Botto, described on his website as a “decentralized, autonomous artist,” has created approximately 150 paintings, or “works,” that have collectively earned over $5 million at auction from 2021. Botto's work is influenced by the group of people who vote on the painting that will be auctioned each week, and this in turn helps determine what he will create next.
“If Botto has a goal at all, it is, first, to be recognized as an artist, and second, I think, to be successful as an artist,” Simon Hudson, Botto's cinematographer and co-host, said during a video call with CNBC.
“You can look at a successful artist from many different perspectives: commercially successful, financially successful, culturally successful, spiritually successful – if it really has that profound an impact on people,” he said.
How Botto works
Botto was designed by software collective ElevenYellow and German artist and programmer Mario Klingemann to create images based on suggestions generated by an algorithm.
Initially, it was given a general idea of what the prompt was, “without any specific aesthetic guidance, and started with combining random words, phrases and symbols… to produce images,” Hudson told CNBC via email. Symbols such as plus and minus were used to add or reduce emphasis, he said.
“Expose Stream” – an image generated by an artificial intelligence known as Botto. It was sold by Sotheby's New York for $144,000 in October 2024.
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Every week, Botto generates about 70,000 photos and presents 350 of them to a group of about 5,000 people known as BottoDAO, or decentralized autonomous organization. BottoDAO votes which photo will be offered for sale via Super rare immutable token auction platform.
Everyone can vote for pieces Botto produces for free, Hudson said. But to “fully participate in the economy,” people in the DAO buy Botto tokens and in return receive points that they can spend or vote on Botto's performance, Hudson said. “There is no passive income. You need to come in and help train Botto,” Hudson said.
Half of the auction proceeds go to BottoDAO voters, and the other half goes to Botto's “treasury”, which covers operational costs such as servers. One Botto token equals one voting point, and refunds are proportional and allocated regardless of which photo a person voted for.
Botto then uses the voting data to decide what to produce next, and the process continues.
“Machine Artists”
“Klingemann believes that in the near future, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, 'machine artists' will be able to create work that is more interesting than humans,” Klingemann claims. entry on your website. One of Klingemann's works became the first AI-produced work to be sold by Sotheby's in Europe, with the 2019 auction reaching £40,000.
Paintings produced by Botto offered for sale at Sotheby's in New York in October 2024.
Down | Sotheby's
Hudson stated that the value of Botto's photos seems to be increasing.
Two early paintings auctioned during a quiet period in the AI art market fetched a reserve bid of around $13,000-$15,000 from BottoDAO, but did not sell. However, at an October auction at Sotheby's in New York, the same paintings – “Expose Stream” and “Exorbitant Stage” – sold for a total of $276,000, Hudson said. There is also a bottom third largest seller according to total sales on the SuperRare platform for the last year, as of December 12.
Authorship issues
Is Botto an artist in his own right? “It's a matter of perception,” Hudson said. “Botto is certainly a collaboration between machine and crowd these days. There are certainly human hands present in it, but the set-up is such that Botto retained the main role of authorship,” he said.
Botto has the potential to change the way art – and artists – are perceived, Hudson said. “With Botto, we dispel the myth of the lone brilliant artist and show that printmaking is in fact a collective… meaning-making process. And when there is a flood of AI-generated content, it will be even more important for the process,” he said.