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On Oct 24, 2021, Botto, a “decentralized autonomous artist” sold its first work for ~$325,000 (79.421 ETH). Slowly, but surely, all the requisite components have matured for crypto-based autonomous artists to take center stage. We now have broader adoption in crypto, NFTs, DeFi, DAOs, GPT-3, Generative Art, & GANs.
What’s new in crypto-based autonomous artists is the ability to inscribe enforceable rules that allow any particular participant to step in and fulfil the required instructions. It being smart-contract based means that these autonomous artist can, ideally, in a fully closed economic substrate: create art, sell it, and incentivize participants to improve it. Throughout this process, various stakeholders can earn rewards from helping this autonomous artist succeed: either by helping it learn, promoting the works, managing its funds, & hosting its infrastructure. The most ideal outcome is that at any point, any participant could step out and step in to keep an autonomous artist alive. Now that NFTs, DeFi, and DAOs have proliferated, these modular components can be combined in many different ways to produce autonomous artists.
Neolastics is also a generative art project I created, that’s backed by a bonding curve. In this case, the components are a bit simpler. Users can pay to generate a new piece with a simple generative art formula. The funds go into a bonding curve where any users can choose to burn/destroy their piece and get back a piece of the reserve. Thus, the supply of pieces grows and shrinks. It curates a set through this mechanism: pieces that people do not want, are destroyed. So, over a period of time, the set curates what the market decides are rare or aesthetically pleasing variations.
I would likely put Abraham, kickstarted by Gene Kogan as the most ambitious imagination of an autonomous artist. The eventual goal aims to incorporate multi-party computation of images such that one wouldn’t entirely know the mind of the autonomous artist. Most of the autonomous artist proposals thus far includes deterministic generation of art. To have an ‘artist in the cloud’, as Abraham, is described, is to also be surprised by the artist’s originality.
Botto has a simple design. Users use a currency called BOTTO to stake and generate Voting Points (VP). With VP, each week, users choose an artwork from among 50 to mint. It is put up on auction on SuperRare, upon which the proceeds are used to reward BOTTO holders: the proceeds are used to buy BOTTO and burn it (removing it from circulation). With the votes, it trains the next set of artwork it shows to voters. Hopefully, better voting in time, increases the beauty of the art being sold.
As crypto & AI has matured, we’re now at the right time and right place to actively play & grow with autonomous artists. The crypto substrate allows for playing in simple ways with it. To advance into a future with decentralized GAN management does require more work. An ideal vision like Abraham will take considerable effort to code up, including the development of multi-party compute and smart contract-based verification systems. There are different ways it could evolve still, but the templates are there. It’s going to be an interesting few years ahead.