AI art is popping up everywhere, and it should come as no surprise that it’s having an impact on the NFT world. Bored Ape Yacht Club remains one of the most well-known collections of Ethereum-based non-fungible tokens, and now they’ve been given an AI art makeover using Google’s cloud network — all 10,000 of them.
So what started as a groundbreaking collection of NFT collectibles has been turned into yet another collection of more artistic NFTs by some seriously powerful machine learning. And they’re sold out already, apparently. Lost? See our explanation what are NFTs? and our guide on how to use DALL·E 2 to catch up.
The Artsy Monk (opens in a new tab) the project leveraged advances in AI and image diffusion techniques using Google’s Colab platform and Cloud Computing service. The team fed the 10,000 images from the original Bored Ape NFT drop into their AI to use as a canvas to create generative art. The machine was then taught to paint in 20 different art styles by being fed 14 million images and a huge dataset of related keywords.
This was no quick AI art generator job. The team ran several servers for several weeks to get the results they wanted, with between 25 and 250 iterations apiece. Crypto Grims, Artsy Monk’s AI artist, wrote in a blog post on Bored Panda (opens in a new tab)“We had to throw away the very first batch even though it ate up almost a thousand dollars, as the AI gave us too many fairies dancing in meadows or demons made of clouds, but can’t quite remember to still make it look like a monkey. “
The final results are striking, ranging from intricate realism to painterly impressionistic scenes, moody cityscapes and fantasy styles, but all with a form that will be instantly recognizable to anyone who has followed the NFT scene – Yuga Lab’s original Bored Ape.
With the market now saturated with profile photo collections that people buy hoping to flip for a profit, Artsy Monke took a different path, aiming to create art that people would simply enjoy collecting and holding. It retains the excitement of imprinting a new monkey, not knowing how it would turn out, but introduces an art element that the team felt was missing.
It supported its philosophy by selling at a cheap price too, at just 0.01 ETH ($15) – Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs are now selling for around 85 ETH (roughly $140,000 right now, but we know how quickly that can change). The 10,000 piece collection is already sold out and new buyers can only buy from existing owners on the NFT marketplace OpenSea (opens in a new tab). Prices remain low, but that could change: Artsy Monke plans to launch Artsy Monkeland, a metaverse theme park that only Artsy Monke NFT holders 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 artwork that you could hang on your wall, but also by using Web3 technology we can also allow holders to access the Artsy Monke games and earn real money,” said the project’s blockchain developer Dan Hovey . “The more Monke NFT you have, the more games you can play and the more money you can earn.”
For more on NFTs, see our guides on how to make and sell an NFT and the best NFT marketplaces. And for more AI art, don’t miss our selection of the weirdest AI art yet.
