Launching an AI art tool is risky business these days. While the AI art movement continues to develop, with artists and galleries holding contests and physical exhibits showcasing the work of artists using the tools, society remains wary of the concept itself. The general public has some reason to be; While much of the criticism leveled against the art of AI is reactionary and fear-based, there are legitimate ethical concerns surrounding the creation and use of the tools.
But from the looks of it, popular cryptocurrency exchange Binance isn’t too upset about the controversy. On March 1, the general manager of the company, Changpeng Zhao announced the launch of a beta version of an AI art tool he’s developing called Bicasso. Through Bicasso, Binance users could play around with the image creation tool and mint them as NFTs.
10,000 NFTs in three hours
Bicasso is similar to well-known artificial intelligence art programs like Midjourney and DALL-E in that users can type a text message to generate an image. Additionally, creators can upload an image for the program to iterate over. Unlike the OpenAI tool, however, the resulting AI-inspired images are NFTs that can be minted on Binance’s native BNB chain.
Being a demonstration of a possible future marketplace infrastructure involving AI art tools, the beta test limited the mint to 10,000 NFTs. Although some users reported functionality issues Due to the high traffic demand after the announcement, 9,214 holders were able to broadcast all 10,000 NFTs in less than three hours.
Experimentation, copyright and research
That he number one crypto exchange on the planet randomly dropped an AI art tool and allowed its users to mint the results may seem a bit surprising, but it’s actually not that strange that Zhao wants to explore its possibilities.
The proliferation and use of state-of-the-art AI tools in the last six months alone is staggering, and companies in almost every industry you can think of are already thinking of ways to use tools like ChatGPT in his favor. Being a major Web3 player, Binance is no stranger to experimenting with cutting-edge technology.
What might surprise, however, is that Zhao announced this experiment so casually given the recent and piling judgments was filed against companies like Stability AI and Midjourney for alleged copyright infringement in the way those programs trained their algorithm.
Exactly how Bicasso’s program works and what images it was trained on is unknown, but it is possible that the Binance team took pains 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.
Bicasso launch comes amid Binance getting questioned by the United States Senate on its regulatory compliance as a years-long investigation by the Department of Justice attempts to determine whether the exchange was involved in money laundering and criminal sanctions violations. While Zhao has consistently asserted that his exchange is fully committed to 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 only a beta test, and there’s still a lot for the company to determine before moving forward, it’s impossible to ignore Bicasso’s popularity. The short amount of time it took for the community to reach the mint cap is another indication that despite the critical reaction AI art tools have received, curiosity about them isn’t going away any time soon.
While there is often a great deal of toxic debate surrounding AI art tools and the artists who use them, it’s clear that there is a great 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, AI art critics tend to view cryptocurrency and NFTs in the same pejorative light, believing that they simply represent a redundant, scam-ridden technocratic dream for a few rather than a valuable and democratic addition to the progress of cryptocurrency. society.
Winning over such a group will take more than attracting a demographic that has already invested in Web3 technology, but it’s still a step in the right direction. At the very least, the experiment is likely to be a small taste of something much bigger involving artificial intelligence art that the platform could release in the future.
