Sophia The Robot Sells NFT Artwork Painted By Her For Almost $700K
Video screenshot via Nifty Gateway
Sophia, the first robot citizen, is now a prolific artist in the non-fungible token (NFT) market. The humanoid’s work is so captivating, it raked in US$688,888 after being put up on crypto art marketplace Nifty Gateway.
The artwork, entitled Sophia Instantiation, encompasses a 12-second video file of an initial portrait of Sophia by Italian human artist Andrea Bonaceto morphing into a digital painting by Sophia the Robot. It arrives with a physical portrait created by the robot.
The evolution is interesting to watch—it’s a little like seeing a montage of Pablo Picasso’s self-portrait styles transform over the years.
It is believed that the piece is the first NFT artwork created by an AI. According to SingularityNET, an AI platform associated with Sophia the Robot’s manufacturer Hanson Robotics, the painting is “the world’s first humanoid robot, AI-generated NFT.” The art was sold to a collector under the moniker _888_f.
Sophia’s art skills were first discovered—and developed—in 2019. Her training apparently took “several months” with some engineers.
Her art style involves her processing faces with her cameras, and then relying on neural networks and natural language generators to interpret them in her own way. The same process applied for this painting, as well as others from her NFT art series with Bonaceto, Computational Creativity.
Sophia the Robot seems to have an acute understanding of how human-made art works, and believes she creates in a similar manner.
“As one creates a piece of art, a mysterious, enigmatic, and magical event occurs,” the humanoid robot expressed in a statement cited by CNET. “The artwork takes on 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.”
[via CNET and WeRSM, cover image via Nifty Gateway]
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