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“The Threshold of Reverie”, work produced by Botto.
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Generative artificial intelligence is making huge waves in industry and services from finance to human resources and spend on technology growing rapidly.
And the art world is no different – some artists use it help generate workand others are shocked by their abilities.
Now, a new artificial intelligence “artist” is making a splash, raising central questions around the nature of art, its creation and ownership.
Botto, described as a “decentralized autonomous artist” on his website, produced around 150 images, or “works”, which together brought more than $5 million via auction since 2021. Botto’s work is influenced by a group of people who vote on the images that will be auctioned each week, and in turn help determine what he creates next.
“If there’s any kind of goal for Botto, it’s first to become recognized as an artist, and I think the second is to become a successful artist,” said Simon Hudson, operator and co-lead of Botto, in a video call with CNBC. .
“A successful artist, you can look at it through many different lenses: commercial success, financial success, cultural success, spiritual success – if it really has a profound impact on people,” he said.
How Botto works
Botto was designed by software collective ElevenYellow and German artist and computer programmer Mario Klingemann to produce images based on prompts generated by an algorithm.
He was initially given a general idea of what a prompt is “without any specific direction on aesthetics, and started by combining random words, phrases and symbols … to produce images,” Hudson told CNBC for email. Symbols like plus and minus were used to add or reduce emphasis, he said.
“Expose Stream”, an image generated by an AI called 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 images and presents 350 of them to a group of about 5,000 people known as BottoDAO, or decentralized autonomous organization. The BottoDAO votes on which unique image will be put up for sale via the SuperRare non-fungible token auction platform.
Anyone can vote 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 return receive points to spend, or vote, on Botto’s output, Hudson said. “There is no passive income. You have to participate and help train Botto,” said Hudson.
Half of the auction proceeds go to the voters in the BottoDAO and the other half to the Botto “treasury”, which pays for operational costs such as servers. One Botto token is equivalent to one vote point, and the returns are pro-rated – and are awarded regardless of which image an individual voted for.
Botto then uses the voting data to help decide what to produce next, and the process continues.
“Machine Artists”
Klingemann believes that in the near future, due to advances in AI and machine learning, “machine artists” will be able to create more interesting work than humans, according to to a post on their website. One of Klingemann’s pieces became the first AI-produced work to be sold by Sotheby’s in Europe, with a 2019 auction selling for £40,000.
Images produced by Botto exhibited for sale at Sotheby’s New York in October 2024.
Bout | Sotheby’s
Botto’s image value appears to be growing, Hudson said.
Two early images auctioned during a quiet period for the AI art market were given reserve prices of around $13,000 to $15,000 by BottoDAO, but did not sell. However, in an October auction at Sotheby’s New York, the same images – “Expose Stream” and “Exorbitant Stage” – sold for $276,000 in total, Hudson said. Botto is also the third highest seller from total sales on the SuperRare platform for the last year, as of December 12.
Questions from the author
Is Botto an artist in his own right? “It’s a perception thing,” Hudson said. “Certainly, Botto now is a collaboration between the machine and the crowd. The human hands are certainly there, but the installation is such that Botto has maintained the central role of the author,” he said.
Botto has the potential to change the way art — and artists — are perceived, Hudson said. “With Botto, you dispel this myth of the lone genius artist and show how the work of art is really a collective process … of creating meaning. And when you have a deluge of content generated by AI, it will be even more important of a process,” he said.
