One of the assurances we’re often given in responses to the fear that AI image generators could replace human artists is that there will always need to be a human involved. Generative AI needs a human creative to tell it what to do. But don’t tell that to Botto, a fully autonomous ‘AI artist’ who just raked in $351,600 in sales at the auction house Sotheby’s.
The non-human artist is now responsible for in excess of $4m in art sales since it began its art career in 2021. But Botto isn’t a free spirit entirely. The AI bot generates images based on its own ideas without human prompting, but a 15,000-member community called BottoDao decides which of its thousands of outputs to mint as NFTs each week, which in turn shape’s the AI artist’s own taste.
