The Top 12 AI Artists
Who will be written into the history books of tasteful AI?
Hello dear readers, introducing the second of a two-part series on AI art - I hope you enjoy reading as much as I did writing! Onward.
In part 1, we went on a journey to answer what makes some AI art good?
We discovered, as was the same in the porn industry, it's the artists that manage to thread the needle between the money (those that can charge an artisanal premium), the morals (those with just the right amount of cheek) and the machine (those that tread the fine line of originality, authorship, and humanism).
But whilst the theory is important, it's time to put some names and faces to those who should be considered the algo stars of our generation.
A top 12 in no particular order!
Frank Manzano
With formal training in film and photography, Frank might not be as playful as his art may lead you to believe. From Renaissance-inspired pastels as a 7-year-old and high school polaroids to neural nets a year ago, his practice has been through the mill.
“Spectaculate” (above) presents a slight deviation from his usual muses, mixing shots from old-school parades and monster truck rallies (minus trucks) to make us feel stuck in the middle of sweaty and breathless crowds, all scored by an unnerving racket of tin cans and band music. It's a Groundhog Day from which you'd love to escape but can't quite close the tab.
“There’s something profane in the limitation of a finite dataset. The images have no hope of transcendence.” - Lamia Priestly (best Frank assessment I’ve read)
Stuck in the purgatory of their own limited datasets, these bikini-clad hallucinations are having the scariest orgy I’ve ever seen.
It reeks of Frank's lovable and uniquely schizophrenic pixels. If Miladys could paint, this would be it.
For more, please read a great interview done here by Plutonium F.
Verdict: purgatory art.
CJ (Dadabots)
A metal musician with a curiosity forged in the fires of university hackathons into neural net death tunes — I honestly haven't met a more unique person at the intersection of sound and crypto.
Much like the pornstars treading the arousing fine line of the machine before him, they plan to eliminate humans from music and pioneer AI Death Metal. If you shagged listening to this, a hospital trip would be next.
CJ's (alongside his partner Zack) work is incredibly diverse. My personal fav, creating the first open-source toolkit for generating GIFs with neural nets (pre-GAN proliferation) - Pizzafire (above) was the first output. Alongside @keyonchirst, CJ also created the world's first AI rap song.
When not making music or working on some top-secret magic at @NoiseDAO, he is teaching and building at Harmonai (part of StabilityAI RIP).
Hail satan and chenquieh.
Hail satan and chenquieh.
Verdict: very loud art.
Mind Wank
With the name of a pornstar and the ethos of a visual poet with a protestant work ethic — what more could you want?
Like all standout artists on Fellowship's tasteful daily.xyz, the engaging 'deformed dreams' really just make you wonder what they're gonna do next (and what crack hath been smoked).
This piece above (megabladder) slightly deviates from his normal muses of chickens and scooters. It plays with retention and release related to internal baggage, positioning the bladder as the real emotional organ. The power dynamics are apparent here, as those who shower of the golden variety may agree.
Verdict: art by a pornstar.
Holly+
Another mad experiment in democratised AI art from trailblazers Holly Herndon & Matt Dryhurst.
When daddy Barlow proclaimed, "Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.", he did not bet on Holly and Matt coding their own.
Pushing boundaries in co-creation, co-ownership, IP standards and authorship, I can't wait to see where this goes. Their stellar work may mean that OpenAI will never again be able to steal Scarlett Johansson's whisper.
Proud to have supported in some small capacity through NoiseDAO and Seedclub Ventures.
Verdict: redefining audio.
Robbie Barrat
Lost Robbies earned their title from a case of explorative technology meets laissez-faire collectors.
“I wasn’t trying to create scarcity, I was trying to create abundance.” says the ex-NVIDIA employee turned artist as he bemoans the snowballing price of his nudes and the larger JPEG casino he has retired from until excessive speculation subsides (...gl).
Fortunately, he left us pagan speculators with something special but unsexy. All 300 unique pieces, of which 264 are unclaimed or lost, show that storytelling and theatre really do pump the price.
But the work itself is seldom discussed. Inheriting the brushwork and palettes of their 19th-century training data, his GAN’s interpretation can only be disguised as a magical and rotting wet nightmare.
Plz send nudes (higher) and follow Ol’ Rob as he continues to make exceptional work.
Verdict: scariest nudes in history.
NiceAunties
With an untamed imagination and an architectural background often limited by physics, this Singaporean artist is fast becoming everyone's favourite in her new limitless medium.
Her own 11 aunties serve as perfect muses for an endless exploration of the absurd and endearing Asian auntie culture. As she mentions, aunties are often constrained in meatspace by age or norms [like herself], but in this malleable realm, the aunts become expressive superheroes.
The piece above (99E ramen) earned its name from a story many may relate to; after a 99E bid, a fat-fingered collector won his auntie a little above market value. He was subsequently refunded, but not before the 'Auntie went shopping, bought and ate something delicious, saw the price tag wrong, got away with it and woke up savouring tasty flavours'.
Simultaneously exploring themes of gluttony, lust and desire, you may think these are innocent, but they are anything but.
NB: What you like to see in a healthy market is artists supporting each other, and this pesky auntie has also been quite vicious in the daily auctions.
Verdict: food porn.
Botto
Botto is the illegitimate code baby of Quasimondo and its one coin one voters. The first legit onchain decentralised autonomous artist spits out JPEGs whilst [some] bagholders get to critique their loveliness; mr algo takes the feedback on board, refines and carries on.
A paradigm shift in incentivised robot <> human eternal co-creation, this artist is taking the exploration of the machine to new territories - a first illicit romance between humanism and the unknown.
Who says that too many creative cooks spoil an artistic broth? Well… I did (but in a different context); here, it usually slaps (there's also a token).
Side note: shoutout to cyborg dao for the work they are also doing in this space.
Verdict: en spectrum autonomous art.
Historic Crypto
Strange History is a 150+ artist collective curated by the 1/1 Historic Crypto, often found “eating conspiracy theories for breakfast and shitting out content.”
As opposed to many other creative arts, in historical fiction, the guidelines for the stories are mostly already there, waiting lost like ghosts for someone to dig them out. And if we know one thing about AI, they're much better at querying databases (and finding gaps) than we are.
Touching on important themes in between the morals and the machine, this series is emblematic of something that will become a norm: bringing the culture of yesteryear back from the dead in a very realistic way (VR night with Hitler and Alexander the Great anyone?).
History, as we know it, is about to get a major rewrite, and these guys are the pioneers in historical mimetic fiction. thermonopoly (above) is one of my favs.
Verdict: art history.
Roope Rainisto
Roope’s getting household now (for a good reason), but I Iost my AI v-plates to LIWA, so here we go.
When trying to mint this in the public sale (sadly botted to shit) - whilst cursing the gods for lack of mempool skills, I decided to have a peruse of the outputs…
Summoning the taste of milkshakes and fries with the perfect dose of appendage-missing uncanny valley, I've never felt so uncomfortably at home. After a few scrolls of the collection, I convinced my degenerate trigger finger that I was looking at something special.
The darling of braindrops even started his own camera-deleting genre: post-photography (even the intellectuals want pamp).
Most importantly, it's still the only JPEG I own that I can show friends (with the price tag on) and have them not look at me with sympathy and disgust.
Shame about the recent sol drop, but hey, I can get down with the subsidised blockspace kids. Shoutout to glitch for great context.
Verdict: retro erotica.
Claire Silver
Claire’s taste is simply synonymous with the movement and thus unmissable. A keyboard AI polymath, she also dabbles in literature, oil, acrylic, collage, and photography.
It's not just that her work is already being recognised by the greybeards; it also strikes home with anyone with an aesthetic pulse.
In a trustless sea of anons, she can't help but stand out as one of those you just know is a real one; a few years ago I had the pleasure of picking her brains on a RedDAO call regarding her exciting future in digital fashion and more…. She remains top of my list for most likely to obtain ultimate PMF through immersive real-time generative world building ["ClaireWerld" plz come soon].
In that vein, the piece above is from corpo, exploring the nature of form in the pixel age. Now, a world full of those characters would be worth an artisanal premium and I'm free for alpha testing.
As AI lowers the creative barriers to entry, "taste is the new skill" says she… fortunately she has it in buckets.
Verdict: role-play chic.
Umut Yildiz & Alberto Maria Colombo
Working under the combined name of UMUT_ALBERTO and the shared notion that the human is still the primary author, their brushes are algos; they set above trying to represent the same three historical themes: the human figure, nature, and landscapes.
Here, they shot human models (yuck) in their studio and AI-ed them into something I haven't seen anywhere else (good explainer): reminiscent of a 2024 Mapplethorpe.
Perhaps, if we remain dominant, we will always use AI to portray and enhance ourselves sexually. Perhaps not, and our species will be used as a has-been real-life figure models for AIs to enjoy for their own pleasure.
Verdict: erotica for another species.
Elman Mansimov
Up last, it's the first. alignDRAW is pulling a reverse uno on it's not about who did it first it's who did it best; Elman's grainy outputs are from the debut text-to-image model created in 2015 (the thesis is simply simple).
Aside from trendsetting, making something this janky and off-prompt as models get better over time will be almost impossible. Ever wondered why people don’t make retro porn anymore? Because the cameras are worse, and it's hard to recreate the vibe that was special because it was captured at a time (otherwise it wouldn’t be retro).
Some may find a way, but a) that's why we have timestamps b) I can take a burnt stick and draw something in a cave, but it won't be no Altimira (it's all about context).
There is solid pushback against the retrospective onchainness of projects like AD (e.g., "Why not Gutenberg typeface next?"), and Purists think that the best art should exclusively have been created in the crypto Golden era (which I kinda get, especially if you have huge bags). For this one, I'd make an exception.
Verdict: nostalgic art.
So there you have it - some generational artists to whet your whistle. I recommend digging into all of them a lot more, a lot more quickly, because you are definitely going to be seeing a lot more of them.
Interested in the next one?
Honourable Mentions:
Artists (could easily have done a top 26):
@zzuk_at_aol, @keyonchrist, @LeMoonSynth, @NeuralBricolage, @ganbrood, @emikusano, @LindaDouniaR, @trevorpaglen, @soficrespo91, @annaridler, @sashastiles, @VanArman, @genekogan, @ivonatau
Producing great content about the artists above:
@plutoniumfitzg, @Lamia_aimal_, @noisedao, @seedclubvc, @hudsonsims, @hollyherndon, @matdryhurst, @RightClickSave, @womenaiartists, @accelxr, @glitchmarfa, @pridesai, @@metropolis_dao, @RED___DAO, @red_eye_world, @ChrisF_0x, @sofiagarcia_io, @balon_art, @_ed__b___, @KRP_DM.
Platforms:
@harmonai_org, @StabilityAI, @FellowshipAi, @cyborgDAO, @braindrops_art, @miragegalleryai, @brtmoments, @wearehume, @pronounceddrop, @tribute_brand, @character_ai, @chub_ai, @belonginghearts, @MoemateAI, @imgn_ai, @chirperai