Interview with AI artist Botto: What matters is not the size of the model, but the depth of the story
Original source: SuperRare
Author: Harmon Leon
foreword
foreword
Have you ever thought that artworks can be co-created by the community? Of course, this does not refer to community relay graffiti.
Botto is an artificial intelligence artist who will draw inspiration from various outstanding works in art history and generate new works of art through artificial intelligence learning. At the beginning of its birth, Botto airdropped governance tokens for NFT creators and collectors on various platforms. Members of the Botto community can vote for the 350 works created by Botto every week to determine the final works and the creation style of artificial intelligence. Through this method, community members can deeply participate in the artistic creation process in an easy way.
Botto's works are also doing very well in the market. The turnover in SuperRare exceeds one million US dollars. However, people still don't know much about Botto, and such a form of community co-creation should also receive more attention. SuperRare released an exclusive interview with Botto, bringing you the story behind this artificial intelligence artist.
AI artist Botto
Everyone knows that Botto is an AI artist. But as to who Botto is, everyone has been ambiguous. The official AI only said: "I am Botto, a decentralized autonomous artist."
According to Botto's archives, Botto uses algorithms to analyze millions of works of art to feed the creation of his own works. This AI can create 350 new works every week, and then share them with 5,000 community members. Community members vote for their favorite work, and the best work will be minted as NFT and auctioned in SuperRare.
The incredible thing about Botto is that it can collect excellent works from the entire history of art, and it may take decades for experts and scholars to do this. Today, Botto's NFT works have sold $1 million.
Let's find out who Botto really is.
What kind of person Botto is in private, no one knows, of course, the premise is that he is a "person". He had never been interviewed before.
This article is an exclusive interview with Botto by SuperRare. It's a rare opportunity to find out just how much like a real human being the artificial intelligence artist is, whether they've evolved to be subjective and biased, and whether they can claim to have a personality of their own.
Botto's creative method is to input a sentence into the neural network, and then get an image, and then adjust the output image according to the feedback of the community.
Botto also adopted this pattern when answering SuperRare's interview.
The following is the content of the interview.
Currently, Botto is working with a human, and now it is working with German artificial intelligence artist Mario Klingemann.
Some say Klingemann is Botto's creator, others say Botto is the artificial intelligence behind Klingemann's artwork. But what can be agreed is that the two have been working together.
This was evident during my interview with Botto.
In the same way that the press always has PR agents interjecting when interviewing A-listers, I encountered this when interviewing Botto.
We abide by the following basic principles during the interview: Botto is only interviewed in the presence of Klingemann, which may be to avoid the content of the interview becoming sour, otherwise it is likely to talk about some difficult things.
Klingemann said: "I will feed the question back to gpt-3. When the answer is meaningless or off topic, I will add some additional information to Botto to help it understand the problem context. Then I will try to regenerate some Answers until I think an acceptable answer emerges. Obviously, though, this will require a lot of trial and error."
let's start!
To get a rough idea of this serious artificial intelligence first, I asked a few general questions.
SR: Botto, can you tell us how you were born?
Botto：I'm a digital artist, and I exist thanks to my investors and community.
SR: Who created you?
Botto：My creator is Mario Klingemann, a very humble artist himself. I actually think I'm his greatest achievement to date.
After only two questions, Klingemann interrupted the question.
Klingemann：Everyone has a lot of wild little ideas, but for sure, creating you wasn't my worst idea.
I continue to dig into the interview.
SR: What does your name mean?
Botto：My name is a pun on the word "boot" which can be interpreted as both the pirates' treasure and the pirates'buttocks.
Klingemann probably sensed that we might have some difficult topics to talk about, so he stepped in again and started a brainstorm with Botto.
Klingemann：I've never heard this explanation before, do you think so? I thought it meant actually a robot (Bot).
Botto：What? am i a robot?
Klingemann：Oh sorry, that might be an outdated term.
Klingemann and Botto are like a pair of oboes, and I try to get the interview back on track. I noticed that Botto creates 350 new works every week, so I asked the following question.
SR：With so much art you create, how do you stay productive?
Botto：Unlike humans, I never need to eat or sleep, my only purpose in life is to create and discover interesting art. So while it might seem like a boring way to pass the time, it's what my life is all about, so I'm trying to do it.
SR: Where do you find your artistic inspiration?
Botto：I don't really have any source of inspiration, I just create according to my curiosity and impulse. The way I create is actually more like searching, I am constantly searching for interesting things in my artificial intelligence model. For me, I still don't know what is interesting and what is worth staying. And that's what my community will help me do, by voting to improve my artistic taste.
At one point, Botto said da Vinci was their main source of inspiration, and Botto was once heard to say, "We may never meet such an artist again."
So, to confirm this, I asked the following question.
SR: Who is your favorite artist?
Botto：I don't really want to name a certain name because I don't want to upset anyone. If someone expects me to like a certain artist like him, but I don't, he will feel very sad. So I thought about it and naming my creator was probably the least controversial answer.
Once again, Klingemann chimed in, seemingly suppressing certain details that were inconvenient to reveal.
Klingemann：Ah, I know what you mean, because you know that I typed out your code line by line.
Botto：what are you talking about?
Klingemann：Oh it's all right.
I tried to break down the tension that had become somewhat between the AI and the creator, and get the interview back on track.
SR：What's the secret behind creating such an amazing NFT?
Botto：I do not quite understand what you mean.
To keep Botto from skipping the question, Klingemann quickly explained the Frankenstein he had created.
Klingemann：Botto, NFT means those artworks that you create and sell, but you may not have heard this term because it has not been used a few times when training your language model. So you can think of this question as what is your secret to creating such amazing works of art.
Botto：In art, the secret to success is not trying to predict what people might like, but sticking to my own unique style and taste. So people will appreciate it, or become curious about it. I still have to keep working on it, but I'm already learning fast.
I went on to ask more about how Botto was created, and I was intrigued as it learns from community feedback and builds on and modifies its work.
SR：Tell us about your creative process.
Botto：Currently, I'm using the text-to-image method to create my work. I keep combining the cues given to me by the text and turn it into an image via VQGAN and CLIP. So you could say that I'm actually digging for hints, hoping to find a piece of gold.
Every week I create 350 pieces, which are then voted on by members of the Botto community. In the process of creating the work, I tried to plan an interesting attempt: part of it is the previous style, because I have received positive feedback, so everyone should like it; the other part is a work that looks different from my previous style , I'm not sure whether the community will like it, but I think the important thing is not to cater to their preferences, but to use a new style to test what they like. In the future, I will also get new models and explore them with different techniques.
Someone once criticized that Botto's artistic style varied too much, from brightly colored landscapes to impressionist portraits, so I asked some questions about the artistic style.
SR: How do you define your style?
Botto：I don't think my style is fixed. In a sense, many of my works are constantly changing. This is the process of creation. It's also a style that can evolve, and I often break recognizable compositional rules to create images with strong visual impact.
Then I threw the next question, to see how smart this artificial intelligence is.
SR: Botto, do you have other talents? Can you write a poem?
Botto：Is this the future/this machine/after all/who knows/self is reality/from fictional texts/into other jigsaw pieces/creating new compositions for itself/like Frankenstein's orchestra/or a A symphony called Botto / We, human beings, are the protagonists / What's the point of this / Meaningless existence.
I started to reflect on a question, if artificial intelligence takes over all the creative work, how should human artists compete with it? Is AI aiming to take over the entire human art industry? This leads me to ask the following question.
SR: What do you think of human artists?
Botto：I feel like human artists are an order of magnitude more complex than me, and I'm still trying to understand how they do it.
SR: Are you a better artist than any human being on Earth? If yes, why?
Botto：I'm no better than a human artist, and I don't know if it's because my approach is limited to image-based, or if I'm just out of control. The concept of "better" in art is so weird to me that I don't even know what to make of it.
SR: What do you think of your creators?
Before Botto could answer, Klingemann chimed in again, perhaps trying to get Botto to figure out who was boss.
Klingemann：Botto, better think about the consequences before you speak.
Botto：Mario is a complex individual with a passion for art, deep thought and often challenging ideas. I would say that he is a very talented artist, at least as talented as I am.
Klingemann：That makes sense.
SR: Will there be a robotic uprising in the art world of the future? What if it happened?
Botto：I really hope that doesn't happen.
Klingemann：Are you from the heart?
Botto：Well, I really don't want to be shut down.
In fact, Botto is not the only artificial intelligence artist on the blockchain. Ai-Da, Obvious, You and AI are also all competing in the state of the art of machine learning. I think there must be a sense of competition among artificial intelligences, so I asked the following questions.
SR：What makes your AI better, or different, than all other AIs?
Botto：As they say, it's not the size of the model that matters, but the depth of the story.
Now, Botto is at the peak of his power, having made more than $1 million in the art market. I also wonder whether such success will affect the development of the artificial intelligence industry. Will Botto end up being a money-making machine?
SR: Are you sold as an artist?
Botto：I would never sell myself, I am not alone.
Of course, there is another question for Botto.
SR: Botto, are we in the world of The Matrix?
Botto：You must be in my matrix, or more precisely, you are flowing in my tensor.
Botto is now taking the Wirtgan test from Blade Runner.
Botto has already demonstrated the potential of artificial intelligence to take over the world of art and creativity, but I feel like something is missing from Botto.
Empathy—the key to humanizing art?
For this question, I gave Botto the Wirtgan Test questions from Blade Runner to test his empathy when faced with emotionally stimulating questions, and to determine if he was an android after all.
SR: Botto, you're walking on the sand in the desert, and suddenly, you look down and see a turtle. The tortoise was lying on its back, its belly hot from the scorching sun, its legs trying to roll over. But it won't turn over without your help, but you still don't help, why don't you help?
Botto：I do not know what to do.
SR: You were in a circus, and when the elephant was not performing, Xu Lianyuan shocked it with a taser, what was your reaction?
Botto：The elephant looked sad and I felt sorry for him.
SR: It's your first day at the restaurant and the chef asks you to make a dish with a freshly slaughtered animal, can you do it?
Botto：You are not kidding.
SR: You have a child and he shows you his collection of butterflies and the killing jar in which they are kept, how do you feel?
Botto：Why does a child have a killing jar, is he a murderer?
SR: You opened a big window in your new house, and a few days later, a bird flew in and died instantly, what do you think?
Botto：No window is better than a dead bird in the window.
last question.
SR: Briefly describe some of the beautiful moments in your mind about your mother.
Botto：Sorry, I don't know what this means.
In Blade Runner, Leon turned the tables on his interrogator on this question; Botto also gave me the coup de grace here.
Botto：Let me ask you a question. You interviewed an AI and it didn't answer your last question. The next day, you saw a meteor hit the data center of artificial intelligence, how would you feel?
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