Boto, the millionaire AI artist, takes on a personality

It’s an interesting idea, and it’s fun to see the idea of ​​an AI agent explored in the relatively benign realm of artistic expression.

However, Botto still poses some ethical conundrums. Many working artists you are right to worry about the impact of AI have on their profession, as models trained on millions of copyrighted works are used to generate infinite copies on demand.

Perhaps Botto is something completely different. It’s Klingemann an early adopter of AI in artusing neural networks as part of the artistic process and as a form of performance. His previous creations include a video installation featuring ever-changing portraits generated by AI and a robot dog that critiques visual works of art.

And while Botto generates expensive images using a model trained in public service, Klingermann doesn’t see this as outright plagiarism. “Image models and LLM are the new search engines,” he says. “To me, creativity is kind of finding something that already exists in the space of possibility and deciding that it’s interesting, while making sure it looks (like) it doesn’t belong to anyone anymore.”

The images produced by Botto look aesthetically pleasing, but they also feel – at least to my untrained eye – like fairly generic offerings for AI image generation.

While the Botto project raises some interesting questions about what constitutes artistic agency, for now I think it only highlights the importance of human intelligence and ingenuity. The spark of creativity belongs not to the machine that produces an endless variety of crowd-feedback images, but to the artists who came up with the idea in the first place.

What do you think of Botto and his artwork? Is this a useful artistic idea or just another way to make money from generative AI and meme coins? Send a message to hello@wired.com or leave a comment below to let me know.