Binance’s AI NFT tool attracts thousands amid AI ethics concerns
Launching an AI art tool is risky these days. While the AI art movement continues to develop, with artists and galleries hosting competitions and physical exhibitions showcasing the work of artists using the tools, the community remains wary of the concept itself. The general public has some reason to be so; while many of the criticisms leveled at AI artistry are reactionary and fear-based, there are legitimate ethical concerns about the tools’ creation and use.
But by the looks of it, popular crypto exchange Binance isn’t too bothered by the controversy. On March 1, the company’s CEO Changpeng Zhao announced the release of a beta version of an AI art tool being developed called Bicasso. Through Bicasso, Binance users could play with the tool to create images and create them as NFTs.
10,000 NFTs in three hours
Bicasso is similar to well-known AI art programs such as Midjourney and DALL-E in that users can enter a text message to generate an image. Additionally, creators can upload an image for the program to repeat. Unlike OpenAI’s tools, the resulting AI-inspired images are NFTs that can be minted on Binance’s native BNB chain.
As a demo for potential future marketplace infrastructure involving AI art tools, the beta test limited the coin to 10,000 NFTs. Although some users reported functional problems due to high traffic demand after the announcement, 9,214 holders were able to mint all 10,000 NFTs in under three hours.
Experimentation, copyright and research
That the biggest crypto exchange on the planet casually dropped an AI art tool and allowed users to shape the results might seem a little surprising, but it’s actually not that surprising that Zhao wants to explore the possibilities.
The proliferation and adoption of AI art tools in the past six months alone is nothing short of astonishing, and companies across almost every industry you can think of are already brainstorming ways to use tools like ChatGPT to their advantage. As a major Web3 player, Binance is no stranger to experimenting with edgy tech.
What may be surprising, however, is that Zhao announced this experiment so casually given the recent and accumulating lawsuits filed against companies like Stability AI and Midjourney for alleged copyright violations in how those programs trained their algorithm.
It’s unknown exactly how Bicasso’s program works and what images it was trained on, but it’s possible that the Binance team did everything they could to avoid training their algorithm on what could easily be seen as copyrighted material.
With Binance’s current legal situation, they certainly don’t need any more trouble.
The release of Bicasso comes amid Binance being grilled by the US Senate over its regulatory compliance, as a year-long investigation by the DOJ seeks to determine whether the exchange was involved in money laundering and criminal sanctions violations. While Zhao has consistently maintained that his exchange is fully invested in cooperating with the law and complying with regulations, he is clearly not afraid to make moves in rapidly evolving legal and cultural territory.
While this was just a beta test and there is still a lot the company needs to decide before moving forward, it’s impossible to ignore Bicasso’s popularity. The short amount of time it took for the community to reach the imprint limit is another indication that, despite the critical backlash that AI art tools have received, curiosity about them isn’t going away anytime soon.
Although there is often a lot of toxic debate surrounding AI art tools and the artists who use them, it is clear that there is a far-reaching desire to explore them among the general public.
This is good news, not just for creative expression, but for normalizing a technology that is widely misrepresented and unfairly maligned. However, art critics of artificial intelligence tend to view cryptocurrency and NFTs in the same pejorative light, believing them to simply represent a superfluous, fraudulent technocratic fever dream for the few rather than a valuable and democratic addition to society’s progress.
Winning over such a group will require more than appealing to a demographic already invested in Web3 technology, but it’s still a step in the right direction. At the very least, the experiment is likely a small taste of something much bigger involving AI art that the platform could launch in the future.
