AI artist Botto has earned more than $1m from NFT sales

An artificial intelligence algorithm called Botto has earned about $1.3 million for its first six works in the form of NFT. The auction takes place on the SuperRare marketplace, writes New Atlas.

When creating a painting, Botto generates random strings of sentences and passes them to the VQGAN neural network, which creates images based on examples of famous works of art.

The CLIP algorithm then determines how close the result is to the original string of words. If necessary, it forces VQGAN to redo the image until it achieves a "passing score".

CLIP also picks up a two-word header for the picture.

Botto uses OpenAI's GPT-3 language model to describe the image. It generates up to ten different passages of abstract poetry, which the development team checks, edits and chooses the best fit.

The algorithm generates 300 images a day. The "taste model" then selects 350 images each week and submits them to community members for voting. The highest scoring image is converted into an NFT and put up for auction.

At the time of writing, the project has succeeded in selling six paintings. The first two sold for between $300,000 and $400,000, but the last lot was worth $81,000.

The developers used the proceeds to develop the project, which issues its own token, Botto, used by community members to vote for what they thought were the best choices. After each auction, some of the coins are redeemed and burned.