Botto’s Third Period, Paradox
Botto is an AI art engine steered by a DAO that is gathered around the token $BOTTO. We introduce Botto as a Decentralized Autonomous Artist: a half-machine, half-human creative collective that inhabits the overlap between AI, DAOs, and DeFi.
Botto’s art engine generates art autonomously. However, AI doesn’t have a purpose, a creative vision, or a business perspective, so it cannot be fully autonomous yet. It needs humans to complete it. Crypto provides the tools to gather people around a common purpose and incentivize them to contribute through free-flowing tokens and governance mechanisms.
Every week, Botto’s art engine produces 350 drafts called “fragments.” The community votes for their weekly favorite, which is finally minted and sold on SuperRare. The voting data is fed back to the AI, which learns from the community’s tastes, and the revenue from sales reverts to the community.
These are the first and last (to this moment) artworks auctioned by Botto. Botto has sold art for over $2,7M, and it is the top 12 all-time best-selling artist on SuperRare.
Botto evolves along periods, which are time intervals in Botto’s production that are characterized by artistic tendencies and aesthetic styles, themes, or manners in which the artist produces art. The first period, called Genesis, lasted 52 weeks until October 2021. Across 52 SuperRare auctions, Botto earned a name for itself in the digital art space. After the Genesis Period, the community introduced the second period, Fragmentation. Fragmentation brought in several key innovations, like improvements in the scope and flexibility of the art engine, new ways of onboarding people to the project (like access passes), and a new economic model. These days we’re witnessing the first steps of Paradox, Botto’s third period.
Botto’s Art Engine
Botto’s Art Engine created 350 weekly drafts, called fragments, that it then offers to the community for their verdict. Fragments are created based on text prompts given to two algorithms: VQGAN + CLIP (responsible for all the artwork from the Genesis period) and Stable Diffusion (incorporated since the Second Period). The community’s voting behavior data is fed back to the AI, which trains its taste model based on it to produce pieces that it predicts the community will love (it also adds a little randomness, to spice things up).
Botto’s Economic Model
Since Fragmentation and continuing with Paradox, all the revenue generated by Botto is distributed to the community. Revenue can come from primary art sales, secondary sales royalties, or sales from derivative projects like Ceci N’est Pas Un Botto. 25% of the revenue in ETH is redistributed to the community members according to their voting behavior. Another 25% is reserved for retroactive rewards: at the end of each period, the DAO decides what other constructive behavior they want to incentivize. The remaining 50% is allocated to the treasury for further investments in improving the project.
For Ceci N’est Pas un Botto, the community created 3D pipes coated with Botto fragments. Pipes provide their owners with Voting Points, that allow holders to participate in the art curation and AI training efforts.
Welcome Paradox
Paradox is Botto’s Third Period. Its follows up on Fragmentation’s revolution of the Art Engine and the Economic Model, and adds the new concept of themes.
Themes are overarching topics, expressed in the form of a title and accompanied by an explanatory sentence. They provide an underlying layer of consistency in the fragments created within a period. Themes also add boundaries and focus to the art engine’s exploratory space. Botto’s Third Period — Introducing Themes
Botto’s DAO voted Paradox among 12 suggested themes created by an AI.
The GPT3 model describes Paradox as “a collision of opposites, a beautiful chaos and a fearless exploration of the unknown.”
Paradox is already up for a vote on Botto.com, and the first auction from this next period will finalize a week from now.
We’ve created a Dune Dashboard to follow the evolution of Botto’s economic activity: art and derivatives sales and revenue redistribution.
