Five AI NFT projects and creators redefining art and authorship
The idea of using code and computers has proven to be one of the fastest growing movements in the NFT and traditional art worlds, given the success generative art has had in both spaces. But what if we could go further? What if instead of using code to create art algorithmically, the code did the art artificial, as a flesh and blood artist would? Well, we have the answer. It’s AI art.
Through the newfound ubiquity of AI art creation tools like Craiyon and Midjourney, getting started making art has never been easier. That said, these tools have created an endless debate about whether artists who rely on AI tools to create their work can even be considered artists. So can they? If this roundup of AI artists and projects finding success in the NFT space and beyond is anything to go by, then the answer is a resounding yes.
In a 2022 episode of the nft now podcast, anonymous interdisciplinary artist Claire Silver addressed the growing concerns regarding AI art. Rather than seeing AI tools as a way for artists to artificially outsource their creative output, Silver compared these tools to a similar invention that gave artists of the time pause: the camera. And just like how the camera gave rise to an artistic movement centered on depicting the world around us, AI tools give artists the ability to take snapshots of whatever they see in their minds.
Given Silver’s view of how AI tools fit into an artist’s toolkit, it’s no surprise that her work in the NFT space still carries a distinctly human element. Touching on themes such as “vulnerability, trauma, disability, social hierarchy, innocence and divinity” on her website, Silver’s work also reflects a new truth emerging in the NFT art world: taste is the new skill.
If early 2022 paved the way for AI artists to enter the pop culture spotlight, late 2022 has done the same for AI writers of all stripes. After the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, the whole world witnessed the great potential of how far AI technology has come. Through this tool, users can ask the bot a series of questions, and even fulfill requests within reasonable limits. So how does this fit into the NFT world, which is mostly associated with audiovisual forms of art?
Enter Sasha Stiles, one of the biggest champions of literary NFTs and the growing AI NFT art movement. Her work in the NFT sphere has largely been about bridging the gap between text and technology, leveraging her lifelong love of poetry and literature, with her work and experience as an AI researcher. While these fields of interest may seem different on paper, her two main interests came to a head with the release of BINA48, a startlingly well-read humanoid AI robot that Stiles himself is developing has its poetry mentor. Stiles is also known in the NFT space for co-founding theVERSEverse, a crypto-literary collective that focuses its discussions on how Web3 technologies can impact and improve the lives and work of literary practitioners worldwide.
Within ten months, digital artist NA1 sought a means to push generative-adversarial networks (GANs) and other AI tools at his disposal to their absolute limits. How? Via the creation of a set of NFT trading cards, sports art, flavor text and everything else created by none other than AI platforms. Hence the eventual name of this massive endeavor: Entropy Cards.
What really made this project so unusual is that it involved as little direct human input as possible, and is effectively the product of telling multiple AI tools to work together to create a fully fledged trading card game. The first step came via training AI models on several existing trading card games, analyzing each card’s art and flavor text. NA1 and the rest of the Entropy Cards team then ordered the ChatGPT precursor GPT-3 to spit out text messages to feed into the GAN used for the project, along with any text each card might contain. Despite how AI tools seemingly did all the work, it required careful curation and guidance from the Entropy Cards team to ensure the cards still made sense.
What might be the next logical step after generative PFP NFTs? Why, generative PFP NFTs made by AI, of course. And so, what better way to put this concept to the test than by trying to reproduce one of the most popular NFT collections of all time with AI tools: Bored Ape Yacht Club.
When Artsy Monk creates Crypto Grimes stumbled across Google’s computing platform Colab, he immediately had the idea to see if he could ask this AI tool to create images in the style of famous artists. His first experiment eventually allowed him to “train a neural network to paint a cartoon punk in the style of Picasso,” as described in a blog post on Boring Panda. A few months later, and with better AI platforms at their disposal, Grims finally got to work on what would become the Artsy Monke collection.
The AI art world doesn’t have to be a lonely space. In fact, entire communities have rallied around these new AI tools that members of the NFT space now have at their disposal. Most notable among them is Botto, an AI artist and NFT project that aims to filter the use of generative adversarial networks (GANs) through a unique Web3 lens. Instead of just one person feeding this AI artist text messages, decisions about the direction of each piece Botto produces are made through a consensus. In short, it’s a decentralized way to create AI NFT art.
After several rounds of collecting and implementing community feedback for each piece the AI artist works on, the process is completed in the execution and sale of a single NFT. And of course, the credited author is not just the AI artist. It is the whole of society that has contributed to shaping the final product.
