Botto, the Millionaire AI Artist, Is Getting a Personality

These images were created by an artist known as Botto, which exhibited at Sotheby's in New York this October and has made more than $4 million from sales of its work. Botto is a decentralized semi-autonomous artistic agent created in 2021 by the German artist Mario Klingemann; Simon Hudson, a media entrepreneur; and Ziv Epstein, a computer scientist and designer. Botto contains an AI image generator similar to Dall-E or Midjourney but its output is also shaped by a “taste model” that selects the most pleasing images generated by a prompt. Klingemann and Hudson hope that this personality will even start to steer the art that Botto creates, perhaps allowing it to use an “unaligned” image generator—meaning one without the guardrails that would prevent it from producing racy or violent imagery—to see if it can develop its own sense of what is artistically acceptable. “Right now we give Botto safe models, but as it gets older you give it things that require greater maturity,” Hudson says, comparing Botto’s maturation to that of a person in human society.