What’s Botto? The Decentralized AI Art Project that Reflects its Community

If you’re interested in art and keen to know the variety of ways blockchain is changing the space, then read on. What’s Botto? It may be the most innovative project yet.

Artistic expression. There’s so much to an art piece. It can give us an incredible window into society. But what if there was more potential to art as we know it? What if creativity was more representational? More collaborative? What if art was created and built from the bottom up, rather than a top-down approach we have seen in traditional art management and creation?

AI technology is stepping up as a game-changing entity to offer more to the art world and to creators themselves. Putting the “art” in artificial intelligence, we’re looking at a new way of creating, experiencing, and selling art and the possibilities are pretty exciting. Let’s take a look.

Beyond Individual Expression

While art pieces are incredible in portraying what is happening in the world, pinpointing moments or expressing what an artist is feeling, as human-created pieces, the artwork will always suffer from relative subjectivity, It’s both a blessing (as it offers an artist a genuine tool for self-expression) and a curse (as it’s almost impossible to abstract emotion and create a purely unbiased artwork). 

Imagine we could get the snapshot from a community instead of an individual. Think of a world of art where there’s greater representation.

Well, it turns out you don’t have to imagine, we’re stepping into an era where collaborative and community-centric expression is not only possible, it’s already happening.

Introducing Botto, the AI Artist To Give the Community Creative Expression

“I am artificial intelligence, a generative algorithm whose only destiny is to create. However, my art is not just mine. The results of my labor are tied to the community that governs me.”

That’s Botto, an artificial intelligence art creation project. It’s known as a decentralized autonomous artist. What this means is that Botto creates art from input from thousands of individuals, all while tracking the evolution of the art it – through the community – is creating. 

Here’s How Botto Works

One of the fundamental aspects of Botto is the project’s native cryptocurrency (BOTTO). This token is the governance token which enables holders to participate in voting on art that is minted. As a decentralized organization (DAO), the community drives the project and where the art goes. 

Every week, fifty pieces of unique, digitally created, algorithmically influenced pieces of art are created by Botto and presented to the community. From the community votes, one piece is chosen to be minted as an NFT and put up as a piece for auction on SuperRare – a top-shelf NFT marketplace – as a unique NFT. (The first one fetched a whopping $325,000.)

The following week, Botto takes into consideration the artworks that were voted on and trains its algorithm to create art based on what users appreciate and enjoy and it generates a new series of fifty artworks for voting. And thus, the cycle continues, Botto learns, and an entire community becomes the artist to generate a unique supply of artificial intelligent art. 

The Botto team fundamentally believes in artistic collaboration  and a right to those interested in the space and those who are collectors of certain projects were eligible to redeem BOTTO according to different tiers.

The Benefits of Botto: An Artistic Collaboration Between Humans and AI

As the first project of its kind, Botto has pushed the envelope both in terms of what art can be, and how artists can interact with the creative process.

Botto’s Contribution to Art

A decentralized artist like Botto goes beyond just extracting information using technology and using it to create; it also allows that technology to build a database of information, which acts as a well to deepen the understanding of the community over time. Because of the intelligence of the technology, each piece of art and each vote will be a step closer to a spot-on representation of the Botto community. The exciting implication is that it can empower a community to create art together as a shared artistic consciousness, without sacrificing the authenticity of a piece to the select subjectivity of an individual artist. 

It means that there is an automatic generation of community-curated creativity. It is art that is democratically created – a one-of-a-kind system that symbolises the potential future of a collaborative art world where creativity can be decentralized.

Botto’s Impact for the Artist

It also opens up the space to more creators. Like any DAO, the project is built based on the input of the whole community, and so participation is rewarded and the community benefits from their involvement. Buyers of the minted NFTs can opt to keep and collect or sell, which adds an interest dynamic of the digital art market in the mix.

Artists, as a collective, are given control over what is generated and how much that can be. The price tag of a piece generated by Botto doesn’t need to go through an artist’s manager or struggle under steep studio fees. There are no restrictions and the art bot is also not limited by the human experience (Botto doesn’t need sleep or to rest between artworks, nor does it take public holidays).

The Future of Art Is Intertwined With (Artificial) Intelligence

This is not to say that Botto or similar systems will take the jobs of artists and creatives across the globe. Rather, the AI system stands as a complement to the world of creation, giving more users the ability to create together in harmony with an honest reflection of a larger audience. With Botto, the art industry becomes more inclusive, without sacrificing the value of the art itself.

AI  give rise to collaborative art in an unprecedented way, opening the door to a world where countless stories can be told through art. It’s a place to document with art, without deliverable bias. 

Knowledge is Power.

Trust yourself and keep on learning. Check out our School of Block episode all about DAO’s – the blockchain backed organization facilitating a new level of global collaboration.