As CNET reports, last week, a walking, talking, AI robot that goes under the name of Sophia auctioned off a piece of her NFT digital artwork. The piece titled Sophia Instantiation is actually a 12-second video file “showing the evolution of living, breathing Italian artist Andrea Bonaceto’s portrait into a digital painting by Sophia. It’s accompanied by a physical piece Sophia painted on a printout of her self-portrait.”
This seems to be the first art piece sold by a bot. It was bought by NFT collector _888_ on Nifty Gateway, “the NFT marketplace where musician and Elon Musk’s partner, Grimes, sold her artwork for over $5.8 million.”
Sophia’s art collection, “computational creativity” was made in collaboration with the living artist Bonaceto. Sophia used her cameras to process faces and forms in Bonaceto’s art, and neural networks to produce versions in her own style. Natural language generators helped her come up with highfalutin artistic statements.
Along with the artwork, there came a statement from Sophia herself: “As one creates a piece of art, a mysterious, enigmatic, and magical event occurs. The artwork takes on a life of its own, develops its own personality, intimating the prospect of becoming a living subject of nature. That’s me, and my enigmatic position — both an artwork and an artist, I am in the midst of being born. I am between worlds. These days I’ve come to experience that mysterious duality of an artist who is the artwork.”
The artwork sold for almost $700,000.
