The article we read was transcribed from a live event. And around the same time as this reading group, I attended another live event, a private view of a selling exhibition of the works of Botto – semi-autonomous AI artist created by human artist Mario Klingemann – who spoke on a panel at the PV. I’ve included some videos from the PV. That exhibition was curated by Leyla Fakhr, who wrote the article we read, and also joined our discussion. She is Artistic Director of Verse, an online gallery of digital art. Remember NFTs? While the market for NFTs has collapsed, the one for AI art remains strong.
Botto is a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) that includes around 5000 dispersed contributors (people who have bought a Botto cryptocoin) who upvote and downvote the works Botto creates, via a Discord channel. (In other words, mostly young, white, male nerds, I’m guessing.) Botto is self-sustaining, having already generated some $6 million, reports Louis Jebb, editor of The Art Newspaper, who moderated the panel discussion I saw. That comes from sales, including one at Christies that coincided with the exhibition, and another a few months earlier at Sothebys.
In the Christies auction, the work receiving the most votes was sold for the top price of $127,000. This surprised many people, including Fakhr and Klingemann, since it is a childlike animation of a lion chasing a giraffe; it will surprise no one familiar with internet meme stocks and crypto culture. Remember Maurizio Catalan’s banana?
During the reading group session, we skipped questions of aesthetics of the work – even Fakhr acknowledged that the works lack any conceptual depth (though we could argue about the giraffe). On the other hand, someone in the PV observed, ‘I can make a strong emotional connection with a cloud in the sky, right?’.
We instead focused on the implications – for example an AI ‘artist’ exploring a new medium (generative art via coding in p5.js). Previously it generated its own text prompts to feed into an image generation model.
Klingemann sometimes describes Botto as a narrative. In this sense, it’s not narrative driving AI but the opposite. He also describes Botto as a ‘holy trinity’of machine, community, economy, Fakhr said. As a ‘semi-autonomous’ artist therefore, the AI system (machine) is not the artist; the community is. Klingemann said at the PV that in order for something to work it needs money, hence the commercial structure. Without the community or commercial aspects, it was pointed out on the panel that Botto would have remained a simple generative art tool.
In this sense, we discussed that you could argue that the community voting mechanism functions as aesthetics by committee, but on the other hand, is it really much different from any market? Someone pointed out that the art market is not solely about market consensus ‘tastes’, but is heavily influenced by ‘tastemakers’ such as publications, institutions, etc.
At the PV, someone observed, ‘Governance and deliberate steps are necessary. Throwing something into the world with as much agency as possible will lead to failure—whether through breaking, harming others, or self-destruction…. Botto is a project in AI alignment. But the alignment problem has always been the problem—how do we align ourselves on how to align AI? And how do we all get along?’
Thus we inevitably came to the ‘Dark Enlightnement’ issue of capitalism being the ‘original’ AI, and therefore more of an existential threat to humanity than the technology as such. I recalled the previous reading group on evolutionary aspects of AI, and the even more extreme view that everything humans (and any living things) do is motivated by ‘selfish genes’ that program us to prioritise behaviours that maximise biological reproduction.
From this, it was observed that entertainment (including the art world) is the least important sector when it comes to existential issues; much more important to look at AI’s effect on governance, infrastructure, healthcare etc. In this regard we looked at WebSim – seemingly harmless internet fun, but when AI can generate realistic simulations of so many things from a single prompt, it gets interesting.
Inevitably too, we came to the juicy question that Botto raises: What is an artist? Is it someone who decides they are? Klingemann asked. Or does it come from specific training (double meaning noted), experience, being part of a community? In the reading group someone observed that ‘the frontier of human expression is what cannot be automated’. There are already artist collectives composed of humans; if we add in the theory that our creativity includes some agency of the tools and materials we use, then this already includes nonhuman participants as well.
Here’s a nice excerpt from that article:
Peter Bauman, the editor-in-chief of the digital generative art institution Le Random and an historian of generative art, sees the rise of semi-autonomous artists as part of the new prominence of what is known as “protocol art”, which, he says, “leverages emerging technologies like blockchain and AI to emphasise co-ordination and collaboration. In that sense, AI is shifting computation from processor to orchestrator, following a trajectory of increasing autonomy in artistic decision-making—from the cybernetic art of Frieder Nake to Harold Cohen’s AARON to today’s semi-autonomous agents.”
AI art is not only about creating and collecting. ‘It is also one that can generate thought-provoking creative approaches that mirror how social and business entities might organise themselves in the future—socially and economically—in a demonstration of how artists, curators and art institutions are often the first to uncover the cultural relevance of new technologies’
Some artists protested the Christies sale which included Botto and some bigger names in digital art. as well as the UK government’weakening copyright law to attract AI investment’. Some galleries have been leading, like Serpentine
From its recent exhibition, ‘Botto sold the 22 selected algorithms on Verse, for a combined value of $850,000,’ reports Jebb. Fakhr confirmed that specifically what was sold in each case was the algorithm, as a digital access on the blockchain. She said they were considering offering as an option those modular LED screens I admired.
‘Botto isn’t a one-off project; it’s intended to outlast us all,’ someone said at the PV. This brought me full-circle to the first reading group session on ‘The Feral’, another AI art project aimed at long-term survival. In this regard it was interesting that Botto’s creators talk about Botto as young, as a child with human parents – the same way The Feral is discussed.