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I Trained An AI To Paint 10,000 Monkey Paintings, And They’re Already Sold Out (40 Pics)
As an artist whose 'real job' is a software engineer, I first started experimenting with AI art when the NFT boom was starting back in March 2021. After much googling (and cursing), I managed to train a neural network to paint a cartoon punk in the style of Picasso. It took my laptop an hour to give me a thumbnail that kind of looked like maybe it could have been drawn by Pablo and also vaguely resembled the cartoon reference image. I filed it away, got on with my life, and technology evolved.
I was blown away earlier this year by an article on advancements in AI and image diffusion so I decided to learn everything I could. After a few weeks of very little sleep, I was finally able to understand it.
Our AI is trained with 14 million images and with a vast dataset of related keywords. It then learns what each of these looks like as more and more noise is added to it. So then when we give it a phrase to try and create the art, it starts with random noise and attempts to de-noise the photo over several stages, scoring itself higher (and so influencing the path it takes) if it gets closer to any of the noisy versions associated with those keywords.
We can ask it to make any art on any subject, in the style of any artist. It does not even have to be a painting. I could ask it to create a photo of a red bus driving down a pyramid in a snowstorm and it would try to paint it.
More info: artsymonke.site | Instagram | twitter.com
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One such image takes between 25 and 250 iterations to get to a finished piece, and would take a regular computer with a standard GPU several minutes, even hours, so we hired virtual servers on the Google cloud and custom-built our own virtual machines.
The GPUs on these sell for $20k each for the GPU alone - so we hired them on a use-per-second basis and I sat up all night babysitting four of them off and on over the course of a week to generate 10,000 monkeys. We lovingly called them Micro Organized Neural Knowledge Engine - MONKE.
We had to throw away the very first batch even though it ate up almost a thousand dollars, since the AI was giving us too many fairies dancing in meadows or demons made of clouds, but not quite remembering to still make it look like a monkey.
I also happen to be friends with a great blockchain developer and web designer and he was able to give the artwork a home on the blockchain as NFTs. I think there's still a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation out there around NFTs but that is now quickly changing. It's true that anyone can copy and save a screenshot of an NFT but only the current owner can trade that NFT to collectors on the blockchain. You could have a postcard of the Mona Lisa, but good luck selling that at auction. NFTs give the artist irrefutable proof of ownership on a ledger. And when that piece is sold down the line, the original creator gets royalty. To me as an artist, that's the best part. Artists can put their work out there without worrying about where it will go.
Apes are popular in the NFT world primarily on the back of the success of the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection. An 'ape' in the crypto sense is someone who buys big into a project, so the bored ape became popular with big collectors who saw themselves as their bored ape profile pics. The market is now saturated with profile-pic collections that people will try to buy and flip (sell for profit), so we went another route and just made art that people would enjoy collecting and holding. Which is why we also made the mint price 0.01 eth (around $10) instead of the usual $500 each because we want everyone to be able to enjoy collecting our little monkeys.
The Artsy Monke collection sold out yesterday, so it is now only available on the secondary market on OpenSea.
We were no. 1 most trending yesterday on most NFT websites and tools and it all happened fast!
“What we gonna do today, Brain?” “What we do everyday, Pinky. Try to take over the world.”
What an appalling waste of electricity. We had actually managed to uncouple economic growth from emissions. CO2 emissions were actually going DOWN as the economy grew. And then blockchain and AI art and NFTs came along. We couldn't pollute hard enough being productive, so apparently we had to do it with useless ephemeral c**p instead.
And yet, here we are, also wasting electricity merely by participating in this conversation.
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"Artist" and "art" is a stretch for this waste of space server and an obvious grifting AD that benefits NO ONE but Crypto Grims, delete this BP! :O
Gotta agree with Erika and Phyzzi ,, the whole block chain nft fad is causing pollution for absolutely zero reasons, and bayc's creators are straight up proponents of the Aryan myth. I mean, the pictures look neat, but,, ya know ,,
What an appalling waste of electricity. We had actually managed to uncouple economic growth from emissions. CO2 emissions were actually going DOWN as the economy grew. And then blockchain and AI art and NFTs came along. We couldn't pollute hard enough being productive, so apparently we had to do it with useless ephemeral c**p instead.
And yet, here we are, also wasting electricity merely by participating in this conversation.
Load More Replies... "Artist" and "art" is a stretch for this waste of space server and an obvious grifting AD that benefits NO ONE but Crypto Grims, delete this BP! :O
Gotta agree with Erika and Phyzzi ,, the whole block chain nft fad is causing pollution for absolutely zero reasons, and bayc's creators are straight up proponents of the Aryan myth. I mean, the pictures look neat, but,, ya know ,,
