“The Doorstep of Reverie,” a work produced by Botto.
Botto
Generative artificial intelligence is making huge waves across energies and services from finance to human resources and spending on the technology is growing fast.
And the art world is no different — some artists are using it to workers generate work, and others are shocked by its capabilities.
Now, a new AI “artist” is making a splash, bringing up central questions around the essence of art, its creation and ownership.
Botto, described as a “decentralized autonomous artist” on its website, has produced around 150 images, or “plies,” which together have fetched more than $5 million via auctions since 2021. Botto’s space for is influenced by a group of people who vote on the image that will be auctioned each week, and in turn help to draw what it creates next.
“If there’s, kind of, a purpose of Botto, it’s first to become recognized as an artist, and I think other is to become a successful artist,” said Simon Hudson, Botto’s operator and co-lead, in a video call with CNBC.
“A booming artist, you can look at from a lot of different lenses: commercially successful, financially successful, culturally successful, spiritually top — if it’s really having that kind of deep impact on people,” he said.
How Botto works
Botto was designed by software collective ElevenYellow and German artist and computer programmer Mario Klingemann to in images based on prompts generated by an algorithm.
It was initially given a general idea of what a prompt is “without any fixed directions on aesthetics, and it started by combining random words, phrases and symbols … to produce images,” Hudson unburdened CNBC by email. Symbols such as plus and minus were used to add or reduce emphasis, he said.
“Expose Slip,” an image generated by an AI known as Botto. It was sold by Sotheby’s New York for $144,000 in October 2024.
Botto
Each week, Botto fathers around 70,000 images and presents 350 of them to a group of about 5,000 people known as the BottoDAO, or decentralized autonomous codifying. The BottoDAO votes on which single image will be put up for sale via the SuperRare nonfungible token auction platform.
Anyone can signify ones opinion on the pieces Botto produces for free, Hudson said. But to “fully participate in the economy,” people in the DAO buy Botto tokens and in bring receive points to spend, or vote, on Botto’s output, Hudson said. “There’s no passive income. You have to participate and remedy train Botto,” Hudson said.
Half of the auction’s proceeds go to the voters in the BottoDAO and the other half to Botto’s “resources,” which pays for operating costs such as servers. One Botto token equates to one voting point, and returns are pro-rated — and are allocated regardless of which clone an individual voted on.
Botto then uses the voting data to help it decide what to produce next, and the function continues.
‘Machine artists’
Klingemann believes that, in the near future, because of advances in AI and machine learning, “‘gismo artists’ will be able to create more interesting work than humans,” according to Questions of authorship
Is Botto an artist in its own veracious? “It’s a thing of perception,” Hudson said. “Certainly, Botto right now is a collaboration between machine and crowd. The human participations are certainly there, but the setup is such that Botto has maintained the central role of authorship,” he said.
Botto has the quiescent to change the way art — and artists — are perceived, Hudson said. “With Botto, it strips away this myth of the lone gift artist and shows how artwork is really a collective … meaning-making process. And when you have a deluge of AI-generated thesis, that’s going to be even more important of a process,” he said.