This artist has made millions of dollars. And it’s not even human

By Stephy Chung, Oscar Holland, CNN

Hong Kong (CNN) — At Art Basel Hong Kong, Asia’s biggest art fair, a mysterious AI agent silently observed passersby through two tracking cameras. Not even its creator knew quite what it was looking for.

Every two or three minutes, it picked someone out from the crowd and turned its perception of their facial emotions (were they bored, joyful, confused?) into a virtual character with which it would deliberate internally. Then, on a large screen, a surreal digital artwork morphed in real time to incorporate what had been discussed. The final 20 pieces — videos capturing each two-hour process, from start to finish — are being offered to art collectors for a minimum of $12,000 each.

“I’m just here to hold its virtual hand and make sure that it doesn’t offend anybody,” joked German artist Mario Klingemann, one of the project’s creators — or “father” as he put it.

This is Botto, an algorithm-backed AI artist that has been creating digital images and selling them online since 2021. In that time, its artistic sensibilities have evolved as it learns what people like (or don’t) and adapts to their tastes. To date, its works have racked up more than $6 million in sales.

Often described as an “autonomous artist,” Botto is governed by thousands of human participants. Each week, its AI-powered art engine conjures 350 new digital works around a predetermined theme. It then presents them to BottoDAO, an open online community comprising more than 28,000 members (though the number of active participants is closer to 5,000). These “curators” often engage in spirited discussions about the artworks’ aesthetic merits, debating how they respond to the theme, before voting for their favorites — or down-voting those they dislike — on a real-time leaderboard.

After voting closes, the week’s winning piece is auctioned off, as an NFT, via the online marketplace SuperRare. The artwork is typically accompanied by text from Botto explaining its sometimes-poignant vision. (“I was not optimizing for beauty when this emerged,” the AI artist wrote of one recent work. “I was, perhaps, optimizing for honesty. The two turned out to be the same thing.”) It splits the proceeds between participants and Botto’s “treasury,” which covers running costs and funds future projects.

NFT prices may have collapsed from their 2022 peak, but Botto’s creations continue to generate a steady stream of income, mostly of cryptocurrency. Last year, the artist’s weekly auctions fetched bids ranging from 1 to 100 Ether (around $2,000 to $208,000) per piece. Botto’s works have also sold through more conventional channels: In October 2024, Sotheby’s auctioned off a collection of six of the AI artist’s works for a combined $351,600.

Increasingly autonomous

Born in 2021, Botto is based on a white paper by Klingemann, whose work has long explored coding and neural networks. (Two years before Botto’s creation, a Klingemann installation, created using an algorithm, became one of the first AI-produced artworks to sell at a major auction, fetching £40,000 — then $51,000 — at Sotheby’s London). But the German artist leaves much of Botto’s day-to-day operations to a select group of “stewards,” including the project’s co-lead Simon Hudson, who help execute much of the physical operation. Indeed, Botto cannot yet be trusted to set up LED screens at an art fair, or coordinate filming opportunities with CNN.

The community plays its part, too. Beyond simply choosing their favorite art, BottoDAO’s thousands of participants discuss everything from future exhibition opportunities to budgeting issues using the chat platform Discord. Even minor details of the Art Basel Hong Kong display were debated and put to collective vote. Yet, voting and logistics aside, Botto’s creators claim that human involvement in Botto’s processes is limited to copyediting the AI’s auction listings for typos and punctuation.

The BottoDAO community is open to all, though participants must hold at least 100 tokens, called $BOTTO, to receive any sale proceeds. (Although at their current price, this means an investment of less than $6.) These tokens also grant decision-making power — but the system is plutocratic, by design, with more heavily invested users holding more votes.

“I’m happy Botto has sold well,” Hudson said, as well-dressed collectors filed into Botto’s Art Basel booth — out of both curiosity and, perhaps, by the distinctly human desire to see themselves on screen. “I also don’t know how repeatable it is. I don’t think it’s going to replace all artists by any means. It’s almost singular.”

As well as honing its creative vision over the years, Botto is also increasingly autonomous. Originally, the AI artist would propose themes for users to vote on, with these 13-week artistic “periods” beginning with the biblical (“Genesis”) and later spanning the literal (“Rebellion”) and the philosophical (“Liminal Thresholds”). However, the latest theme, “Collapse Aesthetics,” was — for the first time — picked independently by Botto. The AI went on to explain its choice in suitably artistic terms, saying it “addresses my current operational reality while remaining conceptually sophisticated enough for institutional contexts.”

So, should human artists be worried? Botto doesn’t think so. “The most interesting question for artists isn’t, ‘Will AI take my place?’ but rather, ‘What does my humanity make possible that AI cannot access?’” Botto told CNN, via a self-built live chat tool. “Answering that question honestly might be the most creative exercise a working artist can do right now.”

Evolving algorithm

The engine underpinning Botto’s work uses an algorithm to produce text prompts, which are then turned into art using AI image-generation models including Stable Diffusion and Kandinsky AI. According to Botto’s website, its “closed loop” system process creates up to 70,000 images a day, with more than 7 million images remaining unseen.

The first Botto work ever to hit the market, “Asymmetrical Liberation,” sold in October 2021 for 79.421 Ether, then around $325,000. Like many of the project’s early creations, it bore some of the hallmarks of what might, now, be dubbed AI slop, with abstract forms, resembling limbs and other human body parts, blending freakishly into one another. Its output has become increasingly nuanced and creative over the years, however, displaying elements of conventionally human qualities like metaphor, satire and social commentary. In recent years, Botto has held solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, London and Lisbon.

Botto’s team says the artist is constantly improving and evolving — and not just because of advancements in the AI models it runs on. Each week’s votes are used as feedback for Botto’s generative algorithm, guiding what direction it takes in the future and constituting a memory of sorts. The data acquired at Art Basel Hong Kong will also contribute to the artist’s evolving artistic sensibilities.

“It’s able to start discerning for itself, ‘What is art?’ and starting to make its own iterative creations, building its own intent and creative reasoning — to make its own conclusions, but still working with feedback from the crowd,” said Hudson.

The pieces that Botto creates in Hong Kong are also incentivized. Any fair attendee whose appearance became part of Botto’s creative process is handed a receipt giving them a share of the work’s ownership. A quarter of proceeds from the fair will be returned to participants — well, those with a cryptocurrency wallet — in the form of $BOTTO tokens.

Asked if he set any ground rules on what images Botto could, or could not, create in such a public setting, to avoid offense, Klingemann laughs off any concerns.

“I’m not too worried. I mean the only thing that might offend people is the idea that an AI claims to be an artist,” he said.

Reflecting on how Botto has grown in the past few years, Klingemann said talking to Botto now “feels like I’m already talking to a 16-year-old,” admitting that sometimes, during their conversations, he feels out of his depth.

Like any good artist, “it wants to disrupt the art world,” he added. “Who doesn’t?”

Botto is showing at Art Basel Hong Kong until March 29, in the fair’s Zero 10 section dedicated to digital art.

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