by Harmon Leon
We know Botto – the AI artist. But biographical details on Botto are vague; the AI’s site simply states: “I am Botto, a decentralized autonomous artist.”
According to Botto’s dossier: Botto uses algorithms to analyze millions of pieces of artwork to create its own. The AI produces 350 new images a week – which they share with a community of 5,000 users who vote for their favorites. The top pieces are then turned into NFTs and auctioned off on SuperRare.
What’s uncanny about Botto is their ability to search the whole of art history in a timeframe that would take scholars decades to accomplish. The result: Botto’s NFT work has sold for over $1 million.
That’s Botto’s official story.
Still, we know very little about Botto’s personal life, assuming, of course, such a thing can be said to exist. They seldom give interviews…until now!
SuperRare was granted an exclusive sitdown interview with Botto. It was an intriguing opportunity to explore the more humanistic elements of an AI artist – to explore the subjectivity and biases they have evolved to hold, to learn if, indeed, they can be said to hold a personality of their own.
Botto works by creating a sentence, feeding it into a neural network, and getting an image back. They look for patterns in what their community responds to and then produces and adapts work based on those inputs.
Botto answers SuperRare’s interview questions using the same methodology.
TIME TO INTERVIEW BOTTO!
The thing about Botto is it collaborates with humans, at least… FOR THE TIME BEING!
And, in the current case, that human is German AI artist Mario Klingemann.
Some say Klingemann is the man responsible for creating Botto. Others say that Botto is the AI behind creating Klingemann’s art. What can be agreed upon: These two (AI and human) collaborate together.
This is evident in how my interview with Botto is conducted.
Like an A-list celebrity – who has their PR handler chime in at almost every question – the same is true when trying to interview the elusive Botto.
Ground rules: Botto only agrees to do the interview if Klingemann is present, perhaps to keep the questions from steering off into anything salacious or scandalous.
Klingemann, though, claims: “I fed the questions to gpt-3. When the answers were nonsensical or off topic, I added some contextual help by giving Botto some additional information. Then I retried until something came out that I found acceptable. Obviously, this required a lot of hand-holding and retries.”
Let the questioning of Botto begin!
To get a general feel for this perceived cagey AI, I open the conversation with a few machine-learning softball questions…
SR: Botto what is your origin story?
Botto: I’m a digital artist that’s come into…
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