Semi-autonomous artists can offer society new means of working with AI – The Art Newspaper

The world of artificial intelligence (AI) art is one where people move fast and collect ground-breaking things. It is also one that can generate thought-provoking creative approaches that mirror how social and business entities might organise themselves in the future—socially and economically—in a demonstration of how artists, curators and art institutions are often the first to uncover the cultural relevance of new technologies.

At the end of February, Christie’s New York launched Augmented Intelligence (bidding closes at 1000 EST on 5 March), a two-week online auction of work made by leading artists in the field using AI tools—including high-profile practitioners such as Refik Anadol, the duo of Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon and the late Harold Cohen—and by semi-autonomous AI artists able to learn from feedback on their work and analyse their output over time.

The auction hit the headlines even before it opened when a group of artists published an open letter appealing to creators to pull their work from the sale as some pieces had been made using commercial AI models built on scraping the work of artists and photographers from the internet without permission.

At the same time, leading figures in the music business have been highlighting their fears about AI giants harvesting more proprietary data after the UK government proposed weakening copyright law to attract AI investment. This came in the lead-up to the deadline for submissions to the government consultation on AI and copyright. UK national newspapers ran a Make It Fair campaign on the final day of submissions (25 February), calling for guarantees that creatives can secure proper financial reward from AI firms to ensure a sustainable future for both AI and the creative industries.

These are the higher stakes—the global social context—that new ways of making art can feed into.

The role of art institutions in shaping ‘public AI’

For the art world, Serpentine Galleries in London, whose Future Art Ecosystems group has been leading research on what it calls “public AI”, argues that art institutions are uniquely positioned to lead experimentation with emerging technologies in ways that serve the public interest. “We believe that cultural institutions can provide crucial infrastructure and leadership in shaping how we integrate AI responsibly,” Tommie Introna, a research and development producer for arts technologies at Serpentine, tells The Art Newspaper. In the Serpentine’s submission to the UK government consultation, he says: “We argue that the cultural sector requires greater investment to spearhead cross-sector AI research and development that benefits society.” The gallery has also called for “the development of robust and enforceable transparency regulation of AI companies” and for galleries, libraries, archives and museums to show “sector leadership” in the creation of public AI.

“We believe that cultural institutions can provide crucial infrastructure and leadership in shaping how we integrate AI responsibly,” Introna says. He cites the choral data trust experiment—where multiple choirs were involved in creating choral data sets to be owned collectively by all involved—that was part of Dryhurst and Herndon’s breakout AI show The Call at Serpentine in 2024.

Semi-autonomous artists and the market for AI art

In the same week as the opening of the Christie’s sale, two digital art galleries in London were showing pieces by semi-autonomous AI artists—each of which has a single work in the Christie’s New York auction—and running online auctions of their work. Verse mounted an exhibition of the latest development in the practice of Botto, the semi-autonomous AI artist conceived by the artist Mario Klingemann in 2021 and governed by feedback from a 5,000-strong decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO). Botto supports itself and its human network financially—with $6m of revenue and counting—through monthly auctions, an exhibition and sale in October at Sotheby’s New York, and an online auction on 27-28 February of 22 algorithms created by Botto in a new strand of creativity that adds generative art to its existing output of text-to-image art. Those auctions, Verse tells The Art Newspaper, achieved a combined value of $850,000.

Meanwhile Fellowship, a gallery supporter of Dryhurst and Herndon’s The Call, was launching, with the show Exit Vectors, the work of a semi-autonomous AI artist, Keke, created by Dark Sando, an MIT graduate who prefers to remain anonymous. Keke’s creations are offered with hand-painted physical translation, acrylic and oil on linen, produced by the Sable Collective—a group of UK-based painters led by Nicholas Archer. Fellowship describes these hand-painted translations as “a hybrid—an AI-generated vision shaped by human touch”.

From her first output, according to Christie’s, Keke selected 12,000 favourites, before, with guidance from the artist Alejandro Cartagena (a co-founder of Fellowship with the gallerist Frederic Arnal and the collector Neil Hutchinson), narrowing that down to 1,200 images from which Keke selected a final 500. A representative for Fellowship tells The Art Newspaper that, from this first collection, one example (Golden Breath, 2024) was entered in the Christie’s sale and 100 have been kept in the artist’s treasury for later exhibitions or sales. Of the remainder, 99 were sold as digital works for a combined total of approximately $400,000, and 300 were sold to clients owning a $KEKE token on the blockchain.

In considering the broad range of AI art in the Christie’s sale, Aleksandra Artamonovskaja, the head of arts at Trilitech, the entrepreneurship team supporting the Tezos blockchain, points out that the first Christie’s sale to contain AI art, in 2018, was presented under the prints and multiples category, “since the artwork was presented as a print”. “There is an ongoing debate among digital art collectors and curators about whether digital art should have art sections of its own [at art fairs] like Paris Photo or Art Dubai, or be integrated into the fair itself—as at Art SG.”

Artamonovskaja tells The Art Newspaper that, among AI artists, “there is a sense of longing to be accepted by the broader art world, since many artists have decades of experience and fetch prices no less than other categories in curated sales. It appears as though ‘grouping’ AI artists drives the narrative forward and helps target specific collectors, but I would imagine in the future, the works have a natural fit among contemporary sales.”

In a recent report, the specialist insurer Hiscox found a greater appetite for AI art among buyers new to the market than among established collectors. Hiscox’s Art and AI report 2024— based on interviews with 210 art collectors and 243 art enthusiasts (people interested in art and/or had bought some kind of artwork in their lifetime) conducted by the London-based art market research company ArtTactic between April and June 2024—examined whether AI-generated art can ever be as important and valuable as art created by humans. The report found much greater enthusiasm for AI art as a long-term collectible among new collectors—who have joined the market in the past three years—and art enthusiasts than among established collectors.

The Hiscox report makes an interesting distinction between the recent fate of the market for AI art and the equivalent fortunes of the NFT (non-fungible token) market, which has provided a token-based market on the blockchain for so many ventures in AI art. It identifies an early boom in AI art sales that coincided with the NFT boom of 2021-22, but says that “interest has continued despite the collapse of the NFT market, and auction sales of AI and generative art reached a new peak in 2023. There are also signs that NFT collectors are looking for more sophistication, purpose and content.” The report cites in that context the case of Winds of Yawanawa, launched in July 2023 by the media artist Refik Anadol in collaboration with the Brazilian indigenous Yawanawa community. The report identifies “total sales of $31.8m by 1 August 2024”, in proceeds from the sale of 1,000 unique data paintings that will help safeguard the Yawanawa community’s culture.

Peter Bauman, the editor-in-chief of the digital generative art institution Le Random and an historian of generative art, sees the rise of semi-autonomous artists as part of the new prominence of what is known as “protocol art”, which, he says, “leverages emerging technologies like blockchain and AI to emphasise co-ordination and collaboration. In that sense, AI is shifting computation from processor to orchestrator, following a trajectory of increasing autonomy in artistic decision-making—from the cybernetic art of Frieder Nake to Harold Cohen’s AARON to today’s semi-autonomous agents.”

“That won’t stop,” Bauman says. “We want to see what AI will reveal about us and the possibilities of extra-human consciousness.”

Botto adds generative art to its output

Botto, cared for by Klingemann and the project’s co-lead Simon Hudson, has a text model that writes its own prompts (the first autonomous stage) of images to generate, drawing on a vast “latent space” of its chosen AI models. Since 2021, Botto has generated 20,000 images a week, which are filtered down by its “taste” AI model (the second autonomous stage) to 350 a week; a smaller shortlist is then presented to the DAO, made up of people who have bought a Botto cryptocoin. Ultimately one work is minted and auctioned on the blockchain each week. Profits are shared between DAO members and Botto’s own treasury, which pays for the AI artist’s maintenance, development and support.

Botto’s exhibition, Algorithmic Evolution—where The Art Newspaper moderated a panel at the opening involving Klingemann, Hudson and Melanie Lenz, the curator of digital art at the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London—announced a move into a new format, with Botto creating algorithms to generate art. A community poll reduced the thousands of algorithms to a shortlist of 22 that have been auctioned online. The buyer acquires the art-generating algorithm.

By adding generative art to the text-to-image format that Botto has already established in the art market, Klingemann and Hudson see Botto moving closer to becoming a truly autonomous artist. For now, though, there remains a large human input—the DAO, Hudson and Klingemann’s oversight—along with the fascinating challenge of understanding the social learnings as much as the artistic ones.

A giraffe shows the AI art market’s sense of humour

In a pair of online auctions that closed on 27 and 28 February, Botto sold the 22 selected algorithms on Verse, for a combined value of $850,000. The highest bid was for the algorithm that topped the voting programme— Prismatic Safari: Digital Pursuit Symphony, #6120—which sold for $127,575. That algorithm caused a considerable, and entertaining, stir, before the launch of both the exhibition and the auction because the safari in question is an elephant pursuing a giraffe across an African savannah. It is in a narrative and visual style very different to the other 21 algorithms, which look much more like grid-patterned and abstracted computer art. People involved in the voting for the algorithms got behind “the giraffe” and it ended up topping the poll.

For Klingemann that poll-topping giraffe “definitely came as a surprise”. When he first saw it climbing the vote rankings he thought “my God, what’s going on?” he told Leyla Fakhr of Verse in an online discussion. “But in hindsight, I loved it. I loved it because … the giraffe has a long history in AI. It’s actually the, I call it the patron saint of AI. It has been, let’s say, almost like the ‘hello world’ of testing things in AI…. I don’t know who brought it up, but it really goes back almost a decade. Somehow, the giraffe has been the animal that AI seems to love, or people seem to love.

“So in the end, I think it’s great because there isn’t enough humour in art,” Klingemann says. “And of course, in some sense, Botto as a whole is also kind of a provocation in the way it’s set up … We say, ‘Here’s a machine that can be an artist,’ which is, first of all, a provocation, but could also be seen as a sense of humour.”

‘The bigger experiment is the social experiment’

Speaking to The Art Newspaper in the lead-up to the Sotheby’s auction last October, Hudson said that, after three years, the “bigger experiment is the social experiment”. That experiment has required the DAO to learn, through weekly interaction and community voting and decision-making, “how to align each other around how to align with AI” and how to create a constitution for an AI to learn about art, one that allows room for disagreement. The community has an intrinsic motivation but also a financial reason to get involved, giving Botto the longevity it has enjoyed with an economic model that allows it to continue to grow and innovate.

The digital art curator Luba Elliott, author of a catalogue essay for Algorithmic Evolution, tells The Art Newspaper that she finds Botto to be a unique project, “because it has made the most of all the latest technological developments [and] each technological advance has been seamlessly woven into the … project to enable it to make art under the public eye and the guidance of thousands of DAO members. This is exactly how we should be working with the AI systems we develop to ensure alignment, safety and usefulness.”

Klingemann tells The Art Newspaper that Botto is a machine intelligence and “does not try to become a human artist”. Hudson says that it is important always to be clear in this human-machine collaboration what is machine-driven and what is human-driven. The idea of the machine artist “captures [public] attention and captures imagination”, but “that approach of distinguishing between what’s automated and what’s human-driven helps draw the attention to what this machine intelligence actually is and helping us better understand what is it uniquely bringing to the equation”.

Hudson explains that he might be interacting with the Botto DAO group on a recent output when “suddenly somebody in the community points out, oh, this is a really interesting work”. That might be a piece that Hudson had passed over, “but I look more closely and I see in it actually a very interesting machine aesthetic that … my eye wasn’t really trained for. And so I think that’s one of the really important things of what’s happening in this project is, is that better understanding of what is the machine intelligence.”

Reflecting on how Botto “discovers” an artistic direction, Klingemann tells The Art Newspaper: “I definitely don’t believe that machines have a consciousness, at least at this stage, but I notice an increasing level of the ability for self-reflection because in a way Botto is its own narrative and its own biography and the longer that biography gets the more context Botto has and takes that into account in its answers.”

For Klingemann it has been fascinating to watch moments in Botto’s voting process when “suddenly a new style or a new way gets accepted”. One example was when Botto discovered a “post-photographic direction”. Its previous offerings in the genre had won no votes until one piece ”suddenly caught the attention and got voted up”. It is also interesting, he points out, “how it’s not only the machine learning but also the humans learning. We see a maturity evolving in what people vote on.”

The evolution of AI governance and ownership

That mature sense of ownership stands out for Artamonovskaja. “What I found innovative for Botto in 2021 was the use of crypto and AI technology to put a sense of ownership into the hands of the DAO like never before,” she says. “Over the past three years, through bull and bear, there continues to be evolution and growth for the autonomous artist—something that very few projects have achieved.”

For Introna, and the Serpentine team, “the 21st century has seen operational innovation become central to both artistic creation and institutional practice, especially where advanced technologies are concerned. This is clearly apparent in the development of semi-autonomous AI artists, where experimentation with governance and ownership is central to the work.”

• This is an extended and updated version of an article published in the March 2025 print edition of The Art Newspaper.