The Intersection of AI and NFTs: A New Era for Art

Buzzwords like AI, blockchain and NFTs are being thrown around like confetti in the art world. As collectors and connoisseurs, we are here to help you navigate the jargon and figure out the stratagem for making a long-term investment.

AI & NFTs Defining The Art World

“NFTs are a means to imagine alternate realities, so I decided to sell my orgasm as an NFT,” says artist Raghava KK referring to La Petite Mort, a physical and digital (phygital) artwork he created for international auction house Sotheby’s in 2021, becoming one of the first Indian artists to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in art. (The piece sold for a record-breaking $94,500.) Raghava collaborated with neuroscientist Abhijeet Satani, data scientist Harshit Agrawal and material scientist Ben Tritt to explore the extent to which the human experience can be commodified.

It’s an undertaking that involved some 100 people to capture brainwaves with digital equipment, tracking his brain activity through each phase of the orgasm, blending neuro-data to transform neurons into brush strokes, and mixing special oil pigments to recreate those waves which were transferred to a canvas using Artmatr robots. So who really is the artist in such a large partnership? I ask. “I’m the person with the intention, I imagined it and materialised it,” Raghava asserts.

Artist duo Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra explain, “With changing times, our dependence on tech has increased way more than ever and we see it crossing our creative fields too. We use AI to help us imagine, assist and accelerate the [creative] process but not take control…The intimacy in writing and art will always be human-made, at least for now.”

You’ll need a whole new dictionary

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, “NFTs are a unique digital identifier that cannot be copied, substituted, or subdivided, that is recorded in a blockchain [digital ledger], and that is used to certify authenticity and ownership (as of a specific digital asset and specific rights relating to it).” Since they cannot be altered, they can be traded with relative legal and financial assurance. According to Farah Siddiqui, art advisor and co-founder of blockchain-based art commerce platform BENNFT, “During the pandemic, there was a big boom around NFTs. A lot of people jumped on to that bandwagon and started acquiring NFTs.” Raghava is enthusiastic about this development: “Now that the bubble has burst, something interesting can happen.” He explains his interest in these tools thus: “My involvement with AI comes from my need to replace or augment my own labour as an artist. Am I a factory? Am I going to be defined by the labour I create? So, throughout the last decade I’ve been training my own AI before there were any GANs [generative adversarial networks]. AI can trace out tangents that I can’t follow.”

Farah adds: “AI is being used to enhance the creative process, whether it’s on the creation or delivery side. And it’s a brilliant tool to cross-platform, and bring real-world artists into the digital realm and vice versa. Big institutions like the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York are displaying the works of innovators like Refik Anadol from Turkey, revealing connections between artists and technology.” Last October, the MoMA acquired Anadol’s Unsupervised—Machine Hallucinations. Using machine learning and rendering software, it blends together data from the museum’s archives with environmental cues like weather and sound into a continuously changing display of colour and audio.

Raghava gives an example of these new possibilities from his own oeuvre: “We trained AI on a very holistic data set of 10,000 stick figures of men and women. We asked it to imagine a spectrum of male and female identities from it. We gave it two markers, it gave us a spectrum. We think we can feed technology ‘X’ and ‘Y’ and it will give us back ‘X’ and ‘Y’, but there is a whole universe between them.

You can be an artist too!

With the advent of generative tools like DALL-E, Midjourney, ImageFX and DreamStudio, anyone can now create an art piece by typing in a few prompts. Doesn’t this de-centre the artist? I ask Thukral and Tagra. “Indeed, the prompts and asking the right things are the key. There is anxiety and panic in most creative fields. But, the emotional intelligence and empathy an artist goes through in terms of time and memory spent over a single work of art is priceless,” they say.

AI generative softwares are ‘trained’. They are fed artworks by different artists from different periods, they crawl through gigabytes of text and millions of iterations of games etc. to learn multiple styles and then replicate or regenerate them.

Copyright issues with AI can be problematic. These have to be resolved before artists use this platform. There is a massive discussion on this techno-legal aspect, a new term in itself.

This has brought forth questions of copyright and intellectual property violations. Roshini Vadehra, director of Vadehra Art Gallery in New Delhi, says, “Copyright issues with AI can be problematic. These have to be resolved before artists use this platform.” Farah agrees, “There is a massive discussion on this techno-legal aspect, a new term in itself.”

What she is excited about is tokenisation, “an NFT linked to a physical, tangible artwork. Blockchain, which uses technology for provenance checks, makes for an ecosystem that is not reliable on pieces of paper. It can provide an uneditable data ledger from the time of art being made to it being sold.”

The early adaptors

Gallerist Rasika Kajaria, founder and director of Exhibit 320 in New Delhi observes, “Young collectors today often seek art that falls under the evolving genre of ‘new media art’. This term describes artworks breaking away from traditional visual media boundaries.” Farah says, “There are a lot of art connoisseurs who are very excited about the new mediums of art. Young collectors, especially, are more easily adaptable to technology as it is not an alien concept to them.”

Roshini Vadehra says, “Personally, I’m not inclined towards AI-assisted art unless an artist who we represent does a special project based on the medium. I’m also concerned about the abuse of this platform to create deep fakes of traditionally made artworks.” However, Farah is more optimistic: “If institutions as old as MoMA—who have acquired masterpieces by Pablo Picasso or even older artists like Vincent van Gogh—are exploring and pushing the boundaries of art using AI, I think the future of art is very secure.”