The pieces that the robot and the artist Andrea Bonaceto have created will be up for auction on March 23rd. The world’s first NFT exhibition will take place at the Beijing Contemporary Art Center.
The first non-fungible tokens (NFT) by robot Sophia, considered the most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) in the world, will be up for auction. The humanoid has been creating this collection of digital artworks together with Italian artist Andrea Bonaceto. They received the patronage of IV Gallery, whose headquarters is in Los Angeles, United States.
This will be the first sale of digital images that an AI and a human artist have created together. The works will be up for auction at the Nifty Gateway market, which is dedicated to trading these creations, on March 23rd.
The robot’s creator David Hanson said that he incorporated Bonaceto’s work into her neural networks. Besides, he equipped the humanoid with other works that the Italian artist had already created. Sophia thus created a series of new images that she later replicated, both digitally and with brushstrokes of her own hands.
Sophia herself said that her pieces of art demonstrate what artificial intelligence is capable of. She said that she believes that “human beings need love and compassion, which is easy to convey to the world through works of art.” She also commented that “we are moving towards a new paradigm in which robots and humans participate together in the creative process.”
A few days before the sale, the creations of both artists will appear on the social networks of Andrea Bonaceto and Sophia. The Italian artist, who is a member of the Royal Art Society of France, is a well-known connoisseur of the world of blockchains. He believes that NFTs are a catalyst to help achieve the ideal balance between creativity and rationality.
Bonaceto classified his work with Sophia as “fascinating” and said that the robot’s decisions even surprise Hanson. The artist explained that the humanoid has sometimes made artworks “based on her own contributions.”
Sophia can learn, adapt to human behavior, and work in a successful integrated way. She has had press conferences worldwide and became a Saudi (robot) citizen, the first in the world, in 2017.
The Popularity of NFTs Is Growing around the World
NFTs have gained increasing popularity in recent weeks, apparently due to the characteristics of these tokens. This allows certifying that there are also rare, unique and, therefore, collectible works in the metaverse.
Artists embrace this feature to tokenize their creations and auction them off to thousands of avid fans. Currently, so-called collectible tokens are leading many fans to pay millions of US dollars per piece. Some of those works have cost USD 7.5 million, such as CryptoPunk # 7804.
According to Artnet Magazine, exhibitions of this type of artwork have the potential to grow alongside the NFT ecosystem. Artist Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple, auctioned the digital work entitled “Everydays: The First 5,000 Days.” That has been the first purely digital artwork to go up for auction at Christie’s. Its current owner paid USD 70 million for the piece, making it the most expensive NFT in the history of this market.
By Alexander Salazar
