Botto, the millionaire artificial intelligence artist, already has a personality

Botto exhibited at Sotheby’s in New York last October and has earned more than $4 million from the sale of his works. In reality, Botto only needs GPU to unleash his creativity. It is an AI system.

Botto is a decentralized semi-autonomous artistic agent created in 2021 by German artist Mario Klingemann, Simon Hudson, media entrepreneur, and Ziv Epstein, computer scientist and designer.

Botto contains an artificial intelligence image generator similar to Dall-E or Midjourney, but its output is also determined by a “taste model” that selects the most pleasant images generated by a stimulus. The taste model is adjusted to reflect the preferences of a community of Botto enthusiasts who vote on the images Botto produces and publish online here. Botto is also governed by a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, meaning enthusiasts can purchase $Botto cryptocurrency and influence how the system is managed and developed.

The recent Sotheby’s exhibition is just the latest in a series of successful exhibitions for Botto. In October alone, $350,000 were sold. Botto has earned about $4 million in total since 2021, its creators say.

Klingemann and Hudson indicate that those who control Botto have opted to add a modified version of Mistral’s largest open source language model and a knowledge base that allows it to converse about its artwork, and that it will be further refined through of interactions with the Botto community. “Through this interaction and through various input channels, your knowledge will grow and you will develop a personality and interests,” suggests Klingemann.

Klingemann and Hudson hope that this personality will even begin to direct the art that Botto creates, perhaps allowing him to use an “unaligned” image generator, that is, without the barriers that would prevent him from producing racy or violent images, to see if he can develop your own sense of what is artistically acceptable. “Now we give Botto safe role models, but as he grows he can be given things that require more maturity,” Hudson says, comparing Botto’s maturation to that of a person in human society.

It’s an interesting idea, and it’s fun to see the idea of ​​an AI agent being explored in the relatively benign realm of artistic expression.

That said, Botto still raises some ethical dilemmas. Many working artists are rightly concerned about the impact AI is having on their profession, as models trained on millions of copyrighted works are used to generate endless on-demand imitations.

Maybe Botto is something else entirely. Klingemann is an early adopter of AI in art, using neural networks as part of the artistic process and as a kind of performance. His previous creations include a video installation with constantly changing AI-generated portraits and a robot dog that shit reviews of works of visual art.

And while Botto generates high-value images using a model trained on public works, Klingermann doesn’t see it as blatant plagiarism: “Image models and LLMs are the new search engines,” he notes. “To me, creativity is about finding something that already exists in the space of possibilities and deciding that this is interesting, while making sure that it doesn’t seem to belong to anyone anymore.”

The images created by Botto look aesthetically pleasing, but they also, at least to my untrained eye, look like fairly generic AI image generators.

Although the Botto project raises some interesting questions about what constitutes artistic agency, for now I think it only highlights the importance of human intelligence and inventiveness. The spark of creativity belongs not to the machine that generates an endless variety of images with feedback from the crowd, but to the artists who came up with the idea in the first place.

Article originally published in WIRED. Adapted by Mauricio Serfatty Godoy.