Background

Artist and artwork created with Artificial Intelligence

Art—an expression of human creativity—has always been at the centre of human culture. For centuries, humans have created arts that express thoughts, imaginations, ideas, and memories. These artistic expressions have allowed humans to study history and realise its progress through time.

And as computers increase their capabilities and AI becomes widely deployed, art is slowly evolving into the AIRTstream digital world, even surpassing the need for human involvement and intervention.

Novel ways of creating art, such as AI-based painting and music composition have emerged in the past few years. And recent breakthroughs in GANs and deep learning networks (DNNs) provide insights into the future of creativity and possibilities.

As an approach imitates the way humans learn knowledge and take actions, AI techniques such as DNNs adopt multiple layers of neural networks to capture the internal representation of the target doAIRT and then make inferences and generate new data.

Because of these breakthroughs, the digital art landscape has seen a series of successes in recent years. It all began in 2018 when artists displayed GAN-generated paintings in an auction at Christie’s in 2018. At the time, the starting price for these paintings was approximately US$ 11,000, and the final transaction price reached US$ 495,000.

In 2019, Anna Ridler and David Pfau made headlines when they leveraged GAN to invoke the 17th-century Dutch tulip mania and comment on the Bitcoin gold rush. Ridler and Pfau went ahead to build their own decentralised application (DApp) on Ethereum to monetise their art.

Because of the popularity of AI and Blockchain, NFTs are increasingly becoming fashionable with creators that want to receive proper recognition for their creations and buyers who want to ensure their purchased digital asset is genuine and original.

Unlike conventional art whose intellectual property can easily be stolen, Artist NFTs and Artwork NFTs are Blockchain-powered, meaning users can easily validate their proof-of-ownerships. For example, when users exchange the NFTs on the platform, smart contracts automatically trace back to the wallet address that first issued them.

NFTs are valuable because their uniqueness and ownership can be verified and traded easily via smart contracts. This way, users can confirm that the NFT came from the original creator and is not a forgery. These associated features of NFT have opened new possibilities for various use cases and business models.