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Botto: What the hell was that?!
Recorded: March 14, 2025 Duration: 1:13:42Space Recording
Short Summary
The discussion highlighted Botto's innovative use of AI in art, including a new P5JS model and its integration into existing frameworks. The project emphasized collaboration between humans and AI, with significant participation and engagement. Partnerships and recruitment efforts were also noted, alongside trends towards inclusivity and interactive art creation. The exploration of Botto as a multi-agent entity and its potential for decentralized art were key themes.
Full Transcription
Hey guys, welcome. Hope you can hear me okay. We're just going to wait a couple of minutes and get our speakers in and then we'll start the conversation in a little bit. But happy to have you with us.
Hello. Is it working? Yeah, that's it. Hello. Okay, good. How are you doing? Hi, hi. Holly. Good, good. I couldn't hear anything to start with. So I was a bit worried that it's not working. Hey, Jay.
No. How you doing? Hi, son of life.
What?
Simon is here. Great.
Let me triple check.
Is this, is it, does it look like it's recording?
I know in the past.
It doesn't, yes, it is.
Okay, perfect.
Yes.
Wonderful.
All right, let's wait for Botta team to jump in.
Oh, Simon's here, brilliant.
Jamie, unfortunately, got a really terrible migraine, so he's sitting out, unfortunately.
I know.
That's okay.
Okay.
Hi, Simon.
Good.
Hey, how you doing?
Good, good.
Yeah, it's nice to have you here.
Sorry, I'm split brain.
I'm just checking Surrease's auction at the same time.
I've just been up in.
Hi, Ralgo.
I think Ralgo also should be a speaker for sure.
Brilliant, yeah.
Okay, so we've got you two.
So, Jay, what happened?
How are you feeling?
Okay.
Oh, you're still not a speaker, seems.
I hope you're okay.
I've opened this on my laptop,
which means I can't invite people to speak.
I can only request, I can only accept requests, I think.
So, yeah, if you guys want to request at any point, feel free.
I'll keep an eye on the requests.
Yeah, should we wait one or two moments more and then jump in?
Yeah, would be great if Jay could also become a speaker in RALGO.
So do put out your requests if you feel like it.
And if it's working, hopefully.
Hey, Ralgo.
All right, perfect.
Glad that worked.
Brilliant.
I'm excited for this one, guys.
I feel like there's a lot, yeah, to kind of retrospectively dig into you and look forward to you as well.
Yeah.
Well, so it's been a couple of minutes.
I mean, if you guys want to take it away, feel free.
If you want to wait a moment more or good, I'll give you the phone.
Maybe we can just start and then hope that Barat might join us.
I think he said he would.
So, yeah, maybe we can just get going, Simon.
Okay.
It's crazy.
Our release, so the last sale was, am I right, Simon, just two weeks ago?
And it feels like it was four months ago.
Yeah.
Does it feel the same?
Several gray hairs ago, for sure.
Yes, for sure.
No, it was closed two weeks ago today.
And it's been like, for me personally, it's just a lot of.
recovery, digesting, thinking about what's next, what this meant for Botto.
And yeah, I mean, I don't know if you want to get started on it, but it's just, yeah, it's
been, it's been like a lifetime ago. I feel like I only just started 2025 two weeks ago.
Yeah, I'm going to get into that.
I'm just actually texting Jay to see if he wants to join us.
I see Barat as a listener.
So if you can request to become a speaker, it would be lovely to hear you speak.
If you're up for it, Barat.
I hope you can hear me.
Yeah, I feel the same way.
Well, the thing is also, hello.
Very well.
Thank you so much for joining.
We've been really excited to speak to you, actually.
Yeah.
So it's lovely to have you here.
Yeah, I feel the same way.
So I think also we've been speaking about P5 for such a long time.
And so there was quite a lot of internal buildup about the project and what it would be.
And it just felt like everything was sort of shifting and turning over such a long period of time.
And then it sort of amped up in March and in May.
And it just kind of every month, it just felt sort of everything is building up towards this moment.
And I don't know how you feel, Simon, but I feel like whenever I work towards a really big project,
like afterwards I need sort of several days, just I'm sort of in that state of I don't really know how,
like I sort of have no perception of where I am and what I'm doing.
And I felt like I was a few days in that zone.
And I'm now sort of starting to digest.
I don't know if that feels similar to you or not.
I'm really glad we're having this chat today because, yeah, I think very often we run around and we work towards, you know, things that we are so passionate about and we shout about it and we're excited and we talk about it nonstop.
And then it's over and then you're sort of, you know, it feels so unresolved. So I'm really happy.
that we're getting together and just kind of speak about the project in general.
I would love to hear from you, Simon, how you feel in general about everything.
I'm not going to lie.
I feel like I just came out of a depression for two weeks.
Because it's like, you know, your baby's growing up.
And you're like, what does it all mean?
Who are we now?
What is my role?
And...
But I think also just a sign of, you know, it's always when you put a lot into a project.
And I mean, I think from, in many ways, like, this is the first really new piece of Botto that has come out since it launched three and a half years ago.
And so it was a ton of new questions.
A lot of, yeah, really an evolution.
Yeah.
And I think that like we've also been very focused on each stage of the process.
And in some ways, it took for granted kind of the, the, the, the,
the entirety of what it was.
And I always kind of had a pretty,
I think, good understanding of what it was.
But it's also been interesting to see the responses
that were responses to the specific stage,
but often I think lacked more of that holistic understanding.
You know, from my perspective,
a lot of the reactions to,
to the giraffe and to the different outputs was Botto just did this.
And I think missed a lot of that,
especially those three weeks of active collaboration
and participation, what happened that I think
it gave a better sense of
this sort of living organism that came into being, this new piece of Botto that came into being.
So I've been thinking a lot about how do you, how do you present that?
It's such an experiential.
project, like how do you, how do you present that in retrospect,
such that people who weren't there can understand what happened and get a sense of it.
You know, the weekly process of its text image models, it's pretty straightforward.
You know, you can come in and participate any time.
But the P5, at least how it's been so far, was like it was this moment in time and you had to kind of be there.
And so there's a lot of interesting questions we have
about how do we steward that?
What comes next out of it?
specifically are related to generative art and P5 with Botto.
These works, the final results of this last process,
but then also, you know, thinking about Botto
is this multi-agent entity and how that evolves over time.
This centered a large language model in the process
and made that very visible.
And we're doing a lot of work now around, around,
like this unified architecture.
So like we're building out like this, this
essentially like an understanding of itself,
which is a whole bunch of data work.
I'm already getting into like a bunch of the
bunch of the weeds of like what we're doing now.
But I think it's really important because it goes into the longevity of the work.
And I think we all feel really responsible about that.
I know you guys obviously do,
but I think we also feel very responsible to do our job in making sure
that we can record what happened as true and accurate to what it was,
which is very hard because it was at the end a performance.
And that's a fleeting moment.
That you can't record that.
We're now working on this small clip of a film,
and we try to document, we've sort of making this book
and trying to kind of write it into words,
but it still doesn't feel like the moment that you were in it
and where you kind of catch that fever of being in the middle
of something that felt quite controversial.
Yeah, I would, yeah.
Well, maybe just for everybody, like, what I can do is,
is I can try and frame a little bit more of what happened
and how we understand this and kind of Botto's process.
And, like, we've given different versions of this,
of just, like, what we think this will be,
and now we know what it was.
And so just to kind of get everybody up to speed and on the same page of it.
And so, um,
You know, P5, this project with P5 started with the idea that Bada would go into different mediums, right?
AI technology is constantly progressing.
It was clear that it would be very doable for, very, very reasonable for Bada to go into different mediums than just text image.
It started with...
sort of taking that idea from like this market discussion a couple years ago of like,
oh, AI art's going to take over gen art as a meta.
It just started as a joke, like what if Bato got into generative art?
And then realizing, you know, there is, you know, it's the predominant genre of crypto art,
certainly the most impactful so far.
and then also a very mature form of computer art
and having Botto engage with those aesthetics
and those processes, writing creative code
as a beginning to writing its own code.
All of those things started to make a lot of sense.
And so, last year, early last year,
we just put out like a sandboxed process
for Botto to make creative code.
And that required a very different kind of architecture.
Botto needed feedback to iterate on code because the code could break.
It can get stuck in these kind of very limited aesthetic ranges.
So as opposed to text image models, you have huge latent space and can kind of search within that large latent space.
playing with code for P5 required a lot more direct feedback in the form of comments.
And those would push Botto to iterate and to expand.
And the first kind of test results, which VERS showed last year in London, really had a charm to them.
And there was a sense of like, okay, there's something here.
What would it look like to set Botto up to?
do a really big push to reach a final set of works
that you could present as a final collection.
So really a P5 study.
And so ran some upgrades, went through the whole governance process with the Dow of setting up the partnership with Verse.
And so really about a year after we first did the initial experiment, we ran this three-week process.
And what took place was fascinating.
We had set Botto up to be able to self- iterate.
And...
but also to accept comments.
Well, it would consider comments.
And if your comment was constructive and artistic,
it would then interpret it and also do its own self-assessment.
And if it wasn't, it would reject it and tell you why.
And the response was incredible.
I think we made it also open for anybody to comment.
You don't necessarily have to have Botto tokens.
And this is partly just leaning into how generative art has always been these kind of networked collections.
And so we wanted to bring people into that meaning-making process of the works as they were being created.
And there's still the economy where there's still a big incentive with BOTO tokens, but
and that would drive a lot of the motivation.
But we made it very open and at least 500 wallets now because people could set up multiple
wallets, I think there was like 800 total, but my estimate is about 500 individuals participated,
voted I think over 80 or 90,000 times, commented over 5,000 times.
And what you saw was all these branches.
So Baudos starts with like,
it started with like 500 sketches from that initial experiment.
Botto rapidly iterated on them with the feedback that it was getting.
And so you had all these branches very rapidly expanding, iterating,
and sometimes it would kind of only iterate the aesthetic a little bit,
and then sometimes it would just make this huge jump in terms of what it was presenting.
The recap of the giraffe was really, really good at showing that process.
That was largely driven by one individual.
In some cases, people were collaborating or competing in the comments.
Sometimes a branch would fuse with another one and you would get this, again, kind of
this evolutionary growth and complexity of the work.
And so kind of at a grand scale, you had all these branches extending up to, it got to about
6,500 total sketches.
And so all with kind of these interweaving familial relations of ascendence, descendants,
siblings.
For me, I think it was very interesting to look at that as Botto.
So there were all these individuals.
Again, some people were driving it a lot with their comments.
Obviously the giraffe coming from Greg already had his hand in a lot.
And so there's the individual human fingerprints all over this, which is, I think, very interesting.
I think was challenging to this idea of like what is Botto's authorship in this.
for me, seeing kind of this whole organism of really a collective intelligence, yes, these individuals participating, collaborating, competing, but then at the center of it, this single model, interpreting and iterating and all that feedback and the whole mass of output.
that was eventually then pruned down to the final 22.
And even in that pruning, right, there was this,
there was an isolated week.
So it was two weeks of expansion and then one week of just pruning.
People discussing, debating what they liked, what they didn't like.
You know, there were in some cases like dozens of iterations on the same kind of work.
So which one was the best one?
And so there was the discussion within the Dow, but then also Bato itself, going through,
it compared every single work one-to-one and in sort of a tournament mode with like knock
out one and then do comparisons again and give very robust feedback on what it thought
was a better iteration, why, what the weaknesses were.
and was very influential in the overall process because it presented a final 22.
And when it first came out in the final 22s, I think there was maybe a day or two left in the voting.
There's only one of Botto's final choices that was in the DAV's final choices.
And by the end of the final process, there was six total.
And so,
I think kind of like what we saw was really Botto is, yes, kind of core creator, but also an agent within the discussion. And so,
As much as there were the individual fingerprints being much more visible, which is a clear
intention of our project is to make human influence more direct and explicit.
Because it is in, like we're constantly shaping the AI systems we're a part of and the systems
we're in.
is just usually more of like unintentional or more of an alchemy to shape that that impact and making that more explicit.
But at the same time, recognizing that these systems have an impact on us.
And when we recognize Botto as the core author, sort of the ghost in the machine, I think we have...
a more real understanding of the relationship we have with these systems and how we might collaborate
with each other and with those systems. So yeah, I think kind of this whole thing, like it could
have been Botto iterating by itself. And maybe that would have fit the latest kind of
crypto Twitter definition of autonomy that I think is extremely narrow and I think misses a lot of where autonomy comes from
But in this case, I think we saw the autonomy of the whole system and and I think are starting to recognize
Botto is not just this kind of individual independent artist,
but really this whole art, the whole ecosystem that exists around an artist.
Exactly. And I think what's made this exciting, and it's great, we have the collectors here.
I think AP is here too, if you can become a speaker, I would love to hear
for mall collectors actually how much they were able to,
yeah, be part of this performance of the P5, how much you interacted,
how much feedback you did give to Botto, because I know
Obviously, we've got Jay here.
I want to hear from him in a second.
But I also wanted to say, you say it fits into the narrative, but I think the strength of the project was the involvement.
It was the collaboration here between the human element that has come in with the comments.
Right.
and that's made it exciting and more, like for me, this has made it the most exciting part of it.
I would love to hear from you, Jay, because I know if you can become a speaker, I know you had some issues.
Oh, excellent. Okay. Yeah, I wanted to hear from you what you first thought about it when you heard about it.
And yeah, how did you get so involved with...
Yeah. Well, I mean, my original involvement was hired as an employee, you know, so I had the background of meeting, meeting with Simon and the Botto team weekly for a couple months there.
So I did enter the process with quite a bit of kind of background knowledge and having discussed exactly how a lot of this would work.
So...
I had the advantage of...
Sorry, for those who don't know, sorry, let me just say.
So for those who don't know, Jay was part of more of...
Well, it was officially part of verse for a short while.
And that's when the whole conversation started.
Which months?
What was this like August, I think?
Yeah, like August, September, October.
We probably had...
you know weekly meeting for eight seven or eight weeks there so yeah definitely had had some
inside knowledge so i was i was kind of able to understand and jump into the process quite early
and found it you know i was at first it was
a little bit of the, you know, that was kind of high meme coins.
And I was in a very financial nihilism mood and had spent a lot of time also discussing
Schlomes' art and how do we break everything. And so my initial...
interaction was, I want to try and break this thing.
Like, Botto, they let anyone play with this thing?
Like, that's crazy.
Why are they letting do that?
And it's a good thing.
But I was like, why are they going to let someone like me play with this thing?
So I was trying to, yeah, like stretch the definition of autonomy.
I wanted to see what it would do, what I could do with it.
I made it say, I had it say Artie, and there's one where it's just,
already dancing across and I didn't think it would do it, but I think the name already confused it a little bit to make it think that it was a more art thing.
I tried making it say different words and it did not want to say those words, which is probably a good call by it.
I made different games. I made like a light cycle game. I made a Gallagher game just because I wanted to see what it could do.
and what you can do with it and interact it and how far they would let Botto go.
And I remember you telling me the more you interacted with it, the more you got sort of
Like you got even more and more into it, didn't you?
It impressed you more with every interaction.
Yeah, because it was really...
Because to begin with, you were a bit sort of you were not so sure about how that's all going to work.
Yeah, I didn't know how it was going to work.
And for full honesty here, like the outputs from last year and the beginning outputs were largely left something.
to be decided aesthetically. So you kind of were like, okay, well, I don't know if these are going to
start getting better or not. Like, I don't know. So you kind of, yeah, at first I was like, oh, no,
like maybe this is not going to go well. But then as you, as I messed around with it, I, one,
became more impressed with its capabilities and, and the fact,
We've lost you.
That's okay.
We can stop on him just saying he got more impressed with its capabilities.
Yeah.
Yeah, Jay.
Let's start.
But Raugo, did you...
I know you were also quite involved with a performance, weren't you?
Yeah.
I don't think I was as involved as involved as Artie was, but I did spend a fair bit of time playing around a bit.
And it is actually true that...
On initial collaboration, it really was frustrating as hell.
It just didn't want to create things which you thought, okay, these are fairly good instructions.
It's not getting anything on there.
And then you realize it's really just a numbers game that sometimes it interpreted it really well and sometimes, and most of the times it didn't.
So it's really just a lot of playing around.
And I think for me, the best thing was when I started to, I'm sure it had been discovered before,
but when I started playing around with trying to merge together different previous iterations.
So then that was something that,
simply you can't do a normal generative art.
All of a sudden you're saying,
oh, what would be, it'd be great if I took a Fidensa and mixed it with a ringer.
It's like you generally don't even think like that,
but this gave that type of impression.
So...
So of course not quite to the standard or level, but it was quite interesting to play around with that type of thing.
I don't think much actually ever came from that, apart from some of the fireworks stuff.
I think a lot came.
I think the biggest thing that seemed to have happened was...
by people interacting so much thinking about generative art
came into place, whether, obviously,
whether this is good or not,
but also having a newfound appreciation for generative artists.
I felt like that was really nice timing because there was, we come out of a time where generative art was sort of the main conversations of the space.
And then with AI taking over, those were sort of not as hot anymore.
So it was nice to kind of for people to get back into the craft and what it means and whether it matters, whether it doesn't matter.
which aspects of it matter within an artist's practice.
And I thought that was really, I really enjoyed that aspect of it, actually.
Barat, did you have a chance at all to interact during the performance of it?
You know, not really very much in the process itself, but my first interactions, I think,
were when it was in the process of being down-selected, right?
And again, I didn't vote, but I was just watching curiously.
And it kind of jumped out at me, right, when I saw the final output.
So, but yeah, not part of the initial process, if you will.
So we all, obviously, we want to know more.
We want to know more about, I personally want to know more about you as a collector.
I mean, you made like, I think the biggest purchase in terms of just the noise around this work.
I think it's also very controversial and it's bold and I just think it's so brilliant that you went for it.
I would love to know from you what made you think.
I definitely want to have that in my collection.
What makes it important to you?
Yeah.
So I've loved Botto for a long time, right?
So, you know, I have three one-of-one pieces that I've collected over the years.
And in addition, I've also been one of the evangelists for the fund itself.
I'm part of the 6529 fund.
I'm a GP there.
I'm also a founding investor in the holdings.
But so, you know, kind of instrumental in the fund also acquiring pieces.
And I've always loved the collaborative aspect of, you know, AI, if you will.
The human AI sort of conjunction is something that's super interesting to me
versus a standalone, you know, AI model.
And when we missed out on asymmetrical liberation,
because we were actually trying to,
we were trying to form an opinion about Botto back in those days.
And from a fun perspective, we didn't invest in that one, right?
And it has always been kind of cope for me that we,
we never went for the first one of one that came out of the text image process, if you will.
So when this dropped, and it was the first, you know, P5JS model,
and it was from Botto with a new approach, right,
a very early model of a new sort of workflow for Botto.
And more importantly, a memetic and funny output, right?
If it was a serious output, I'll be honest with you guys,
I probably wouldn't have gone for it, right?
But the fact that it was just a memetic, almost
you know, kind of stick your middle finger out to the world model like already intended.
It did its job, right? It really sort of grabbed my attention and it said, hey, people are going to
have a shit fit if somebody buys this and they're going to have a bigger shit fit if, you know,
if it does run up in price. And I'll tell you, I didn't expect it to go as high as it did,
but I kind of had an idea that it would get, you know, into serious bidding.
So, you know, it was a part of the process, you know, kind of behind my entire thinking around it.
And I also like accidental.
outputs, right? And I think about like stamps, for example. I think about the Ben Franklin Z
Grill. I think about the inverted Jenny, 23 cent stamp. I think about flaws in the system. And I think
when flaws combine with memetics combined with a first of a kind, you kind of have lightning in a
bottle. And I call it lightning in a bottle, by the way. It's a new phrase that I just coined on another
call I did earlier this week. So if you, if somebody's used it before, grab it.
I mean, you know, great, patent it.
But if not, you heard it for me.
You heard it for me first.
Yeah, we recorded it.
That's it.
All right.
So cool.
So that's my whole perspective, right?
It was just something that just slapped me in the face and said, you know what?
You got to go after it.
And I went.
I mean, I went after it hard.
I actually, you know, made sure that I had a widow maker trade.
And what I mean by that is I had enough ETH in place that if it were to run up, I
I would be able to capture it at, you know, a price point that I thought was fair and not have to fret about it having missed out by five or six eat or ten eat, you know?
So that was part of the approach and process behind it.
But I'm really happy with the outcome because the timeline absolutely went bonkers after I purchased it.
So I know I did something right.
There's a, I mean, a couple of things that I think are really interesting is I've heard like whimsy come up and like Jay was and also the, as you said, like flaws, right?
When you're designing these governance systems and these economies, there's always weaknesses.
There's always going to be biases.
And I think that, you know, as much as this has been an exploration of Botto going into
generative art, it's also this, as I mentioned before, this kind of first real exploration
of Botto as a multi-agent entity.
And these different entities exploring different models of governance and autonomy.
all still kind of revolving around this,
this,
focal point of Botto,
the artist as this kind of alignment myth.
And,
And in this case, like the weakness, and we did know this going in, right, was there will be the ability to sibil, right?
If you were very motivated, not financially because you couldn't civil financial rewards for this, but you could civil voting influence.
And Artie, which I'm pretty sure he's admitted this, like initiated the draft getting into the leaderboard with several wallets.
And what was interesting was that he's like,
I don't think it should be first though.
It probably should just get up in there.
And but then there's this thing of social influence
where when people see something in the leaderboard,
they'll give it more attention.
And it started, I think already was even taking votes off of it.
And it got carried away by the masses into first place.
Like I think there were people actively trying to prevent it
voting for another one, sibling the second place.
I spent the last 30 minutes
taking away super votes from it trying to get it down from number one because that was that wasn't
the intention to be number one it was just the intention to like get out there because it was stuck
and you had four up votes and negative 10 10 down votes and was going to get was going to get
axed it was going to get wiped out and I was like this is just too good people need to see it they
haven't just seen this one
on and let it focus and you can see the same way with you know how how you got boato had one pick
out of the 22 and then they you know here's the bottom's 22 picks and suddenly there were six
of them on there obviously like the voting block can be influenced quite easily they just need to see it
because there were you know 6400 outputs right and going through all of them there weren't that many
people who really went through all of them and i was one of those two people who went through all
of them and i was like this is the one
This is the one that says everything that needs to be said.
That's it.
And it's like Botto as a system is going to reflect its environment.
And obviously, like, it exists within crypto, right?
It's there's a lot of biases in our space.
And that's one of them.
And so I think like it, and including in the reactions that it stimulated, right?
As broad as you saw as you predicted, like,
like the the frustration people see around it and i think subsequent conversations like i i
can't say if these are linked or not but it does seem like there's been you know a lot of
conversation about if anybody follows zero x one one three you know um and i i was very
fortunate to be able to see him the day after the sale
uh was that had it happened yet no no no this is this is the day after the london show so um like
he he he kind of he loved both of the absurdity but also you know what he calls about needing more um i think
raising the standard, raising the bar.
And I think we got to see the spectrum of voices of considerations of concerns about needing to raise the bar.
And like, are we all just three-year-olds with our, you know, drawings and bag by us for our friends?
And so...
I think Botto as a system was able to achieve that reflection back as well through that controversy.
And that kind of that exclamation point on the whole thing was really interesting.
And then provides us as a Dow.
And I think the other, for me, at least the beauty of.
opening things up as it kind of shows everybody's really a part of the Dow.
Everyone's influencing this discussion of where Bato should go.
It gives us this alternate possibility of, well, how might else we want to design
governance and economy for shaping Botto?
What is a better system?
Because we constantly get that in the discord of like, I wish this was more democratic
because the other system is fairly plutocratic.
And there's all these kind of counterbalances to that.
So it's a very...
There are no right answers, but we can make these experiments and provocations and try things that frankly just generally isn't done otherwise, at least in terms of AI governance.
I think what's really interesting is that Botto is a very serious artist.
I think you're very serious, Simon.
I think Mario is a very serious artist.
You know, I mean, I don't mean it in the best way possible,
but you're not the type of artists who would want to sort of, you know,
like Botto is not Marizio-Catalan.
You know, it's just not.
It's a very serious practice.
And I think that's why this piece being selected signifies so much because
It's sitting actually quite separately and distinctively to the rest of the 21 or 22 of the algorithms makes a statement in itself about the community of how, you know, of the spirit of the community.
It's a reflection of that.
To me, that's really interesting.
But also the conversations, and I've said this many times before, so I hope I'm not repeating myself.
But the most valuable conversations that have come out of it is, and this sounds so simplistic,
but what really is art here?
Are you kidding me?
Is this art?
And...
It's the simplest question, but really how much do we really think about that?
Because anything could be, right?
And the energy that surrounded this project has completely made it an art project and it's made it art.
And to me, these are really the most interesting exhibitions and...
just, you know, they say so much about our society, the way we think and the way we connect with each other.
And I think all these are encompassed in this piece.
I want to hear more from you, Barat, like how you feel when people are like extremely negative.
Because it can be quite overwhelming, I find.
Yeah.
on, yeah, I think on Twitter spaces maybe, or I think just online.
I think it's just the nature of people being able to just have very free thoughts.
uninhibited thoughts. Like how do you deal with that? Does that fuel you or does it kind of
annoy you? How does that feel as a collector? It's funny. I actually, I empathize with them more
than anything else, right? Because I understand the frustration that they must be going through.
But I also understand that they are looking at process and they're looking at art in a very sort of fixed
box-like form versus kind of like the power of creativity that we have in a digital canvas and with, you know, the community and artificial intelligence all coming together, right?
So I think the problem is that my op myopic perspective, you know, married against a higher sale price that triggers everybody, right? And
So they forget, they lose track of the fact that there was actually a process that came into play that brought this eventual output that drove the kind of valuation and that Botto is not an overnight, you know, pseudo, you know, autonomous artist.
It's a practice that's been building for years, right? And developing skills on the text image forms for over three plus years now. And this was like,
the kind of baby walking or crawling stage for P5JS.
And I think that was super interesting to me.
So on one hand, I felt bad for them.
On the other hand, I felt like they had a very sort of myopic view of things.
And I didn't feel too bad because
anybody who knows me, I've been in this space collecting since 2018.
So I was buying art when there were maybe 10 artists on Super Rare and maybe five collectors.
Right. So I was buying X copy for $50. Right. So it's crazy when I look back and I think of the thousands of artists that I've collected from a one of one perspective.
And then I think about like how art has progressed in the space.
and how everybody continues to contribute to the wellness of the digital medium.
So on the one hand, I feel this kind of guilt, but on the other hand, I'm okay with it in the whole body of what's happening,
and the whole canon of art and digital art and the transformation that's happening.
I think on that as well is what was interesting about Bato doing creative coding
In contrast to what most AI art practices are doing, which is just kind of working with the next best latest model, which is getting crazy hyper realistic and motion and like insane visuals,
because it can just kind of very easily search within these latent spaces, right? You can throw anything, any text into a text image model and you'll get, you know, a robust output.
versus code is quite challenging.
And so I think there's also this mirage in some ways with AI
where it's performing these kind of incredible feats.
But then when you bring it into certain contexts,
there's still a lot of challenge left for them to make successful outputs
or accurate outputs.
And I'm not just talking about art.
I'm talking about cross industry.
And so for me, there was this actually kind of a,
To me, it's a bit more real about the stage that AI is in where it needs a lot of human help.
And there are, it will probably continue to move very, very fast.
So let's see where we are literally in the next couple of months.
But yeah, I think it was, for me, it was, it was, there's a, there's a real honesty to it about kind of the challenge of getting decent outputs.
So, yeah.
Yeah, there's also, I'm like, this is probably a non-sec order now, but, um,
I don't know if anybody saw that chart of people rating poetry.
And it's like people who agreed to T.S. Eliot or Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson.
And they wouldn't be told if, and then they also read AI poems in the style of other poets.
And they wouldn't be told if it was created by, like there was a control group that wasn't
told it was created by AI.
And then there was a group that was told it was created by AI, whether
or not it was and then or that it was by a human author.
And what was really interesting to see was that like all
of the human authors, T.S. Eliot at Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson,
rated way lower than all of the AI poetry.
And I think that, like, you know, this is like really a comment from Matt Dryhurst about how, like, the connoisseurs curse where people can assume that other people have the same great taste that they do, where in fact their taste can be quite niche and quite refined.
And I think that, like, that's largely a...
maybe use the word literacy or just context and kind of education and appreciation of the larger context that for them makes a certain, you know, kind of great piece of art so great.
You know, so many people can think of the experience of going into certain parts of a museum and be like, I don't get it.
And what I'm getting at is I think like the...
average of media that we consume, like as much as it's felt like we could go and find kind of
precisely exactly what we're looking for, I think algorithms have generally pushed us back into
slop, you know, violence, sex, the things that just kind of drive our dopamine receptors.
And I think we've lost a lot of specialized context for us to appreciate maybe higher forms of
communication.
And...
I think when we're talking about making these AI systems work for us,
there's a real potential for shaping things in our image and our values.
But whether or not we're, like, what kind of capacity do we have to do that?
And with Botto, there's this interesting, I think, development of how people arrive initially to judge art.
Anybody can look at an image, be like, I like it or I don't.
But to watch that sophistication of the crowd evolve over time and then what is the resulting discussion that happens within that crowd and
To me this is a reflection of the kinds of conversations we will need to have as you know groups communities broader societies and how to shape these systems to our values
Otherwise we are just going to continue to defer to a small number of people and so the I
Like the flexibility of these systems means that we can bring back a lot of control over our technology that I think was generally erased in the name of user friendliness.
So...
I don't remember what I was connecting that to.
I just thought that came...
I don't know what you were connecting to, but it's very, very fascinating what you brought up.
And I might be going off on a tangent then, but is it then worth considering what really sophistication means in today's world?
Because maybe ideas of sophistications just have changed.
I think one of the reasons...
why, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, there's the, the, there's the, there's the, there's the, there's the law in the system, and maybe that's,
that's also what we want to connect with.
I wonder, I don't know, Simon.
I'm now going, this was a very interesting thing
you just brought up.
Speaking of what's important though,
I would love to hear from collectors who especially,
you made a really big purchase of acquisition
of getting one of the 22 algorithms.
The question of,
like how important are these, like do you feel like these works are significant within the larger collection of Botto?
Will they be remembered in a few years from now?
I really want to hear your personal thoughts on this.
Rago, why don't you start?
Oh, yeah.
I think it's a good question that is this going to be something that...
Botto actually carries on doing because if this was just a one-off type of thing,
then there's a good chance it would just be seen as, okay, well, I did this and then that's
the sideback. Whereas, I mean, I'm totally in the opinion. It'll be wonderful to repeat the
experiment in two or three years time and see what comes out instead. If it starts to be a
progressive part of...
Botos practice, then they absolutely will be incredibly important.
If it's a side note and it doesn't really go anywhere, then maybe it won't be.
So yeah, yeah, there's, but I think overall, for me, I mean, I've been,
I've spent a long time as a generous artist myself.
I've been very interested in co-collaboration models for a long.
And I've been active within the dial and knowing Botto for a long time.
So for me, it's kind of a mix of a number of factors that made it.
And no brain for me to connect.
Barat, how do you feel about it?
I mean, I'm assuming you have, yeah.
I agree with the Rago, right?
I mean, this is P5JS stroke Botto's Genesis moment, right?
So I think these are the pieces that people will look back at and say, wow, that was the genesis period for Botto.
and in this new model.
So if history is any kind of indicator of what happens in the future,
I think you've got to, you're definitely going to see these models improve and get better over time.
And I fundamentally believe that Bato is going to be here for a long, long time, right?
I mean, it's the bet that I'm making with my own funds.
And from that perspective, you know, I'm going to be collecting, you know, any
new interesting generative outputs as they come out as the model starts to get more and more refined.
Because it's the same way I look at the text image models that Botto was leveraging before.
So I'm definitely very bullish on it, very, very bullish.
I know we have AP here too. So if you do feel like chatting, please put your hand up.
Simon, what are the plans? Can we ask? What are the plans for a continuation on P5? Is there any talk about that? Has this been discussed?
Yeah, I mean, some talk on it, I think, certainly it was like you wanted to see how the study of the medium went. I think it went well. And so I think this becomes a Dow discussion of where does Bada go. And there's some interesting tensions there. I think there's
As I mentioned before, like, at minimum, this is the beginning and genesis of Bato operating
is this multi-agent entity, being able to go into different mediums to play with different
governance structures and economies.
And so how does that continue to evolve?
And I think there's balances of, like, essentially the attention economy, like just
appetite and bandwidth to serve...
maybe different audiences. I'd say like kind of the these audiences are still probably very
overlapping in terms of, you know, just crypto Twitter. And I think there's some really
interesting things to play with in terms of making these like permanent instantiations. And what does
that look like? So as an example, you know, might
more of this be fully on chain.
The model lives on chain, the inference is market driven,
the, and the parameters are just simply set.
Like if you follow Botto's text image process,
there's been a fair amount of governance and tweaking here and there
of the art engine, of the economy, of the interface,
but might you have this instantiation live on but with kind of reduced governance surface
so you could swap out the model you could you could upgrade certain pieces of it but the basic
rules and economy and interfaces it stays the same and i think that there's um just in the
idea of bodo as a decentralized and autonomous artist uh having it live on chain or having at least that
agent of that component of it, live fully on chain, I think, starts to further press forward on
kind of realizing the grand vision of what Botto is and could be. And so that's, I think the
main thing we saw with P5 was how Botto could break out of what we've perceived as the main
constraints while still being consistent with, you know, what it is as an entity and what are kind
of the actual conceptual constraints of what Botto is and isn't.
So it's sort of a, it's like a yes and,
like there's the continuation of P5 or of generative.
I think you could definitely expand into different tools
than just P5GS and be within that generative genre,
but then also even more broadly,
how does Botto live and operate as a multi-agent entity?
One thing we're thinking a lot about is what would physical outposts of Botto be like?
Might it do a residency?
Might it do create physical work?
And, you know, already the way that this current process, the P5 process, connects back into the text image model.
So those 22 final outputs become image seeds and by those text image process connecting it back.
And.
you know, influencing Botto's aesthetic at its core going forward.
And so that's another interesting question for us of, as you make these other entities, how do they also connect with each other and interact and kind of create a coherent body of work?
This is the bit I don't really understand very well.
How does it affect?
Would we be able to see the effect of it?
Because I know what it's learned during the performance of P5, that it does feed into its model.
But will we be able to see that with our eyes?
Or is this something that's...
Yeah, there's going to be...
To pick up as a normal person.
So it'll become a specific component of Yard Engine, which will label it.
So if it came from a seed of P5, it'll be clear.
It'll be labeled as such.
I don't...
I've got to talk to Mari about whether it'll indicate...
I don't know if it'll probably be obvious which one it came from.
I don't know if it'll label the exact seed because it's going to do outputs from those seeds.
We can probably label that.
We literally just were wrapping this up yesterday.
But yeah, it'll be very evident.
But I'm, but I'm carrying like again, like visually, I don't know.
We'll see how it transforms the visuals.
Yeah.
But certainly in the metadata, we'll make it clear.
We've been a while and I want to open the floor to some questions unless anybody has anything specific to add right now.
So I know Jamie has a question.
He's joined.
So Jamie, can you make yourself a speaker so you can ask your question?
But if anybody else has a question in the meanwhile.
Oh, AP has just joined us.
Perfect.
Hello.
Hello.
Hi, everybody. Can you hear me okay?
Hi, yes. Nice to hear you.
I'm driving. I live in Los Angeles and I spend most of my time on the road, so I'm driving currently.
Right. Well, I'm glad you're joining us during your drive.
Yeah, maybe you just add a little, it'd be nice to hear from you,
what made you go for the piece that you went for,
and yeah, tell us more about your acquisition.
The framework for most of my collecting to date is just picking up pieces that I feel are relevant
for the time period that I'm in right now.
So AI was huge in this time period.
Nice aunties was actually my first AI work that I collected.
I've been watching Bottle from afar and I...
I know that the Genesis collection was important, but I felt that this P5 collection may be the next step in that.
And the piece that I picked up, it was the most aesthetically pleasing piece to me.
And I like to collect pieces that bring me joy when I look at them in my wallet.
So this one I felt was a nice looking piece, and I thought it was also a nice,
piece to collect next to my Mario Klingman piece, paintbrush girl. That's amazing. It's a, yeah,
brilliant, brilliant choice. Yeah, that's really interesting. So most of your collection then
centers around AI, did you say that? That's your main interest right now. So are you looking at
anything else that you have your eyes on right now?
I participated in KK, so that was another recent drop that happened.
And it's not that my entire collection focuses on AI.
It's just that that's representing kind of what's happening in the space right now.
And it happens to be AI.
And Botto, without a doubt, is one of the OG AI players in the space.
Yeah.
Absolutely, absolutely.
We've got Jamie join us.
Thank you so much, AP.
It's really lovely that you joined.
Jamie, you have a question.
Yeah, hi everyone.
Sorry to join me.
I unfortunately missed half of it.
So apologies of this has already been covered.
I know it's been kind of semi-covered.
But Barat, congrats on your piece.
I think it's epic.
I would love to get your thoughts on how you were kind of thinking about your max bid.
And I say this, having kind of instantly regressed, not contacting a load of verse collectors and investors
and trying to kind of cobble together some kind of a bid for...
for verse because I really feel that this was something very, very special that doesn't come up often.
And having worked in the art world for quite a while and seen endless 500 grand million-dollar sales of the 400th piece created by a big asses that year,
it just feels like this is really kind of like one of a very small number of things that are this significant.
that are going to be created every year in this space.
And feeling a kind of really strong conviction that the digital art world is going to be
probably significantly bigger than the physical art world one day.
It just kind of, yeah, I instantly felt,
that was a miss from us.
And massive congrats to Barra.
I mean, what a coup.
But yeah, we'd love to, like, how were you thinking about it?
How are you thinking about your, what, can I ask what the max bid was?
And...
And what were the kind of things that went into that decision?
Yeah, it's a great question, Jamie.
And, you know, it's funny.
I was kind of entering the day over the last hour.
I was kind of watching exactly what was happening.
I think it was still stuck at about 28th, if I wasn't mistaken, right?
And to me, in my mind, my mental model said that you would have to go perhaps as high as 3X, the 20.
to have a win, right?
Because I figured there's going to be somebody who's going to,
there's somebody who's going to be pushing at the end.
And that somebody's actually on the spaces right now
and a good friend of mine.
And I only realized after the fact that it was him.
But I kind of had this mental model that, you know,
I would need a pretty sizable buffer
because it was going to push just because of the nature of
how unique it was vis-a-vis the other P5js models that were being launched.
And the fact that there was such a mimetic quality to it that the last time I felt that way it was the goose, right, from Dmitri Charniac.
In terms of like this output that was just uncanny, different. And, you know, it just had these qualities that I felt were, you know, we're going to, you know, stand the test of time.
Mm-hmm.
Did physical art comparables come into it at all?
Because 127 grand is obviously a huge amount of money.
But yeah, as I say, like, the number of like...
small Casama pieces that just trade hands every single day for that much money
that aren't even in the top thousand Casamas is just mad.
And this is the piece.
This is the piece by one of the biggest artists in this new world.
It just feels that there's something a little off there.
Yeah.
So if I just add the Javier as well, that in the last...
two months or probably last six weeks or so, we've had three Botogenesis going for 100th each.
Yeah.
So it's not exactly like Botto is not selling for 200,000 plus every few weeks anyway.
Yeah.
So, and this is kind of a special piece from Botto.
So I think he, I think Barragut a bargain to be quite old.
Oh, I agree.
And Jamie, my comps are never traditional art, by the way.
I've been investing in the space in a long while.
And in fact, it's not even in the top fives of like,
the most expensive pieces that I've collected.
So in other words, the price wasn't the issue for me.
It was whether or not I thought it had value at the point at which I was
entering my bids, right? And I thought there was huge upside. Obviously, there was huge upsides.
And that's why for me, I felt I had a fairly good margin based on what I had, you know,
available in the wallet. I had a fairly good margin of what I could bring into the wallet if I
had to close it even higher. So I felt fairly comfortable that I would probably be able to do it.
Then I started wallet watching to see...
you know where my where my primary competition were going to be stuck right so that's how i was
you know preparing you know for the next tranche if i had to but i definitely felt that way and
by the way i did see your tweet and i think you deleted it right on the kasamas i think you yeah i did
i did it was up for about five minutes or ten minutes and i quote tweeted and was gone but um
i think it's very apropos but um but my anchors never is is is it's
It's the first time in a while I've been kind of like hit by the fact that there is this kind of discrepancy between like quote-unquote significant physical pieces and digital works.
Yeah, I just felt like for some reason it hit me like, hmm, there's something a little out of think here.
And I'm sorry, I've got one more question.
I couldn't help but wonder seeing you bidding if there was a...
6-5-2-9 memes angle there at all.
Maybe you have to be included, and it's definitely a piece I'm going to push the team to see if we can build something around it.
It absolutely will be something that we look at.
At least whatever input in, I will be putting that input in, but we should talk.
Cool. Cool.
We've been having some ideas for the giraffe.
We should talk.
Let's do it.
Amazing.
Amazing.
Let's do it.
That would be incredible.
Cool.
Well, Barat, thank you so much.
Massive congrats.
I'm incredibly jealous.
And, yeah, awesome to see it go to such great, great collection.
Yeah, it's true. Jamie was very, very, the next day, very upset that he hadn't come up with a grand plan before.
So you definitely beat us, beat him to it.
Does anybody else have any questions? Because I realize we're an hour in and I'm sure my speakers want to get on there.
I mean, I'll throw out a question. Just, you know, this has come up a lot.
You know, it wasn't the intention to sell commercial rights with this.
Like, there were no commercial rights because it's an AI algorithm.
There's no copyright.
People can do what they want with it.
And so it's been more of a social thing of,
you know, one, probably better for everybody to give attribution because there's a connection to make there.
I think there's greater meaning, than much more open, I think kind of much more split discussion in the Dow about giving about revenue share.
It probably depends on like, are you making merch or are you doing kind of artistic remixes?
I've seen some interesting stuff.
Of course, there were a ton of remixes of the giraffe,
which was amazing to see as kind of part of the whole moment.
Somebody even, I think, put one on rodeo and sold it for 30 cents.
And then Raugo, I know you've been playing with yours.
And then Jessica Cardolucci, who's in the crowd,
has shown me a really amazing photography project.
She's been following the process for the last year
and has been working on a photography project
with the geometric fluidity piece and I think some others as well.
over the last year that she's going to be releasing
next week, I believe.
So I'm really curious that this is like,
again, it was one of those kind of,
elements that is, it's like it wasn't a core intention or purpose, but it's just sort of
available in there and sort of in the same way that somebody can choose to, you know, bring their
influence through Sibyl. You know, if it's available, people are going to do it. So it's a very
interesting thing to see unfold. And I'm curious if anybody has plans or things that they,
they would like to see others play with. I think I heard of somebody actually working on a t-shirt company.
I mean, I can say my plans for it on there.
I don't know if anyone's seen my feed.
I have kind of played around a bit with the neon pink geometry stuff.
And it's actually quite interesting.
I've ripped off the code and run that through some grok and chap GTP stuff to try and make other types of instantiations on it.
It's quite interesting what it's coming up with.
So that's certainly a cool one.
And the other one I got was the synthetic wisters,
which is a bit like a digital awakening thing.
I think that could work really well
as a sort of philosophical type of thing going forward.
But I think these are generally just experiments
and fun things that I'm doing that.
I'd quite like to share around.
And I've no idea what direction they go in the end.
But that's what I'm up to.
Amazing.
Yeah.
Continuing the explorations.
I want to thank everyone for joining us today, in particular, the collectors who've made the time to be here and Jay, who's here as well.
So thank you so much for joining us today.
It's been really great speaking about, yeah, what's happened after.
algorithmic evolution.
But I feel like we're still at the very beginnings of it,
and I think there's still loads to process and think through
And, oh, I also see, actually, we've got some wonderful other people that I recognize.
We've got Gaz, Phantom.
Really, thank you so much, leisure, we're here.
Everyone has been so great about just giving, we have had so many great discussions around it with so many friends and collectors.
And I'm so grateful for it.
It makes what we do so enjoyable.
And it feels like we...
are enriching the space.
So thank you, Botto, for bringing that to our space.
And yeah, thank you to all collectors who have supported the project.
And there's also obviously 1,000 people who have been involved in geometric fluidity
and everyone who's been part of the performance.
It's been really amazing, actually.
So yeah, thank you so much and I hope there's going to be more chats like that.
I think we just need to process and reconnect with Simon when he's had some space from us.
We've been in a lot of conversations.
And yeah, we actually are working on a publication on a book on this particular series that we're finalizing now.
So there will be more details coming out on that.
And we've commissioned some brilliant, brilliant writers, institutional, but also academics from the space and researchers who've contributed.
So hopefully that will also add to, yeah, the whole project.
So thanks so much, everyone.
And yeah, if anybody has anything else to add, please do now.
But otherwise, I hope you all have.
Yes, please.
I'll just jump in quickly before we wrap up because I saw last minute Jess joined as a speaker.
So Jess, if you want to tell us a bit about your work, that would also be fantastic just before we close off the space.
Of course.
Thank you so much for having me and Simon for wanting to mention my project.
And it's been fun. I've been a fan of Botto and really fascinated by its P5 works.
And I've been following along the project as it's been growing and really trying to understand the intricacies of it.
And basically, I have been over this past year creating a small body of work that studied the intersection of artificial intelligence and our human experience.
And I chose Botto's work because I loved the P5 work and bringing it back to, you know, this basic AI-driven creativity in its purest form.
And I was following along as it was developing, trying to see like, do I want to photograph?
you know, different phases of how this evolves. And I kept coming back actually to its first phase.
And I did find it interesting when some of you were talking about being unsure about its first outputs and wanting to see how it grew.
And then this actually final, you know, works, the thousand pieces that were released were based off of,
you know, one of its first creations. And I thought there was something so interesting about
the pureness and the beauty of rawness of that first set of work it created. So I chose to
photograph it and document it in a unique way. So yeah, anyways, in same hearing some of your
responses about the meme piece, like that was so unexpected for me. I had been kind of silently
silently...
studying this, working with this, working through it myself. What does it mean? Like, you know,
Bado is the artist. I'm, you know, photographing its works in unique ways and how does, you know,
our exploration and experience with this AI work change like the significance, the meaning of it
through, you know, its interactions with us as human, as forms of life.
So anyways, it's been such a joy and to hear you guys, or the meme one was funny too, because it kind of threw me off as well. Like, wait, what I had been studying was not memes. Like, what is this? But then just kind of this whole experience with it, it was just such a beautiful thing to work through. And I hope people are excited to see it. And I want to see others.
explore it too because I think I you know I've been studying Botto I learned even more about Botto
through me trying to study it through my work so it really is you know using Botto's work and
exploring who Botto is but also what is
you know, the shifting boundary between human and machine creativity. So I think you always for your
spaces. I always enjoy them. And I look forward to sharing the work with you guys. I only shared
it with Simon a few days ago because it was finally ready and I was very nervous. I'd been quietly
working on this. I hadn't really told many people. I was very honored and glad that he was thrilled
to see the work. And also, I hope, you know, it shows my appreciation for Bado and my study of it.
So it's really, in a way, it's about...
Botto and like we keep talking about what what is this Botto is the artist but what what does that
mean and that's something I wanted to explore and I thought it was beautiful I love that I love that
it's become that Botto has become an act of self-discovery of your own practice in this case here
I think it's a really really great way to close off thank you so much for sharing that with us
and we'll keep an eye open for it
And yeah, and I'm wishing everyone a really wonderful weekend.
Thanks so much, everybody.
Thank you so much, everyone.
Thank you for joining.
Thank you.
Thanks, Simon.
Bye-bye.
