The art of AI is popping up everywhere and it should come as no surprise that it’s making an impact in the world of NFTs. Bored Ape Yacht Club remains one of the most famous collections of Ethereum-based non-fungible tokens, and now AI has given them an artistic makeover using Google’s cloud computing network – all 10,000 of them.
So what started out as a pioneering collection of NFT collectibles has turned into another collection of more artistic NFTs thanks to some really powerful machine learning. And they’re already sold out, obviously. Lost? See our explainer What are NFTs? and our guide how to use DALL E 2 to catch
the artistic monk (opens in a new tab) The project took advantage of advances in artificial intelligence and image dissemination techniques using Google’s Colab platform and cloud computing service. The team fed the 10,000 images from the original Bored Ape NFT droplet into their AI to use as a canvas to create generative art. The machine was then taught how to paint in 20 different art styles by receiving 14 million images and a massive data set of related keywords.
This was not a quick AI art generator job. The team ran multiple servers for several weeks to get the results they wanted, with between 25 and 250 iterations per piece. Crypto Grims, the AI artist at Artsy Monke, wrote in a blog post about bored panda (opens in a new tab)“We had to throw out the first batch even though it ate almost a thousand dollars, because the AI was giving us too many fairies dancing in the meadows or demons made of clouds, but it didn’t quite remember to make it look like a monkey.”
The end results are stunning, ranging from intricate realism to impressionist painterly scenes, moody cityscapes and fantasy styles, but all in a form that will be instantly recognizable to anyone who has been following Yuga’s original NFT: Bored Ape scene. Labs.
Now that the market is saturated with collections of profile pictures that people buy in hopes of profit, Artsy Monke took a different route, aiming to make art that people would simply enjoy collecting and owning. It retains the excitement behind coining a new Ape, not knowing how it would turn out, but introduces a fine art element that the team felt was missing.
He also backed his philosophy by selling cheaply, at just 0.01 ETH ($15): Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs now sell for around 85 ETH (around $140,000 at the moment, but we know how fast that can change). The 10,000-piece collection is now sold out, and new buyers can only buy from existing owners on the NFT market. Open sea (opens in a new tab). Prices are still low, but that could change: Artsy Monke plans to launch Artsy Monkeland, a metaverse theme park that only Artsy Monke NFT owners will be able to enter to access Play to Earn (P2E) video games. Yes, the metaverse is a strange place.
“We wanted Artsy Monke to be works of art that you could hang on your wall, but also, by using Web3 technology, we can also allow owners to access Artsy Monke games and earn real money,” said the developer of project blockchain, Dan Hovey. “The more Monke NFTs you have, the more games you can play and the more money you can win.”
For more information on NFTs, see our guides to how to make and sell an NFT and the best NFT markets. And for more AI art, don’t miss our selection of weirdest AI art even.
