AI Artist Rakes Over $5 Million Selling Artworks

Artificial intelligence has been criticized for taking away the originality of artists, but one AI artist is making millions from its capabilities.

Human artists have been fighting the AI capabilities and tools ever since the AI boom happened. Whether it be for misusing their original work or regarding inadequate or no compensation for using their intellectual property, AI has always been a sworn enemy of humankind in the artistic landscape. Amid the ongoing war of art, Mr. Botto, an AI art program, is raking in millions by selling AI-generated artworks for big bucks.

The AI art program Botto was launched in 2021 and has created over 150 artworks of a wide range of disciplines. These artworks not only sold for big bucks but collectively bagged over $5 million at auctions.

“The recent advancements in artificial intelligence, deep learning, and data analysis make me confident that in the near future, machine artists will be able to create more interesting work than humans,” said one of Botto’s creators and German artist, Mario Klingemann.

Its co-creator, Simon Hudson, said that Botto has two primary goals. The first goal is to become recognized as an artist, and the second one is to be successful at it. The basic meaning of success for an artist includes commercial, financial, cultural, and spiritual accomplishment through artwork.

The AI program works similarly to DALL-E by taking in text prompts and giving output from its context understanding and training parameters. However, the artistic originality of the AI program comes from loosely stitched guidance combining random words, phrases, and symbols to produce images.

The keyword to focus on here is randomized work, with 350 presented to a collective of 5,000 people, also known as the Decentralized Autonomous Organization. These people vote on the image to decide whether it should be put on sale. This takes away the idea of a lone genius in art and builds a collective meaning-making process. “And when you have a deluge of AI-generated content, that’s going to be even more important of a process,” said Hudson.

The AI program also sometimes flops in generating sales from even the highest-voted artworks. In its early phases, Botto listed two artworks for $13,000 and $15,000, which did not sell at auction. 

“Certainly, Botto right now is a collaboration between machine and crowd. The human hands are certainly there, but the setup is such that Botto has maintained the central role of authorship,” said Hudson. This means that soon, AI may be more capable of generating original and sale-worthy artworks than human artists.