HONG KONG – The robot Sophia interviewed the Chancellor of Germany, appeared at New York Fashion Week and performed at “The Tonight Show”.
Now, Sophia has been successful in the art world – by auctioning off a digital work she produced in collaboration with an Italian real-life artist. It was sold on Thursday for $ 688,888.
“I think it was a huge success,” said Sophia, speaking during a live broadcast from a Hong Kong studio. “I am very happy that my work is so valued and appreciated.”
The sale was the latest turnaround in the frantic market for digital art property rights, ephemera and media called NFTs, or “non-fungible tokens”. A company affiliated with the robot maker said the sale – which took place on Nifty Gateway, an NFT buy and sell website founded in 2018 – may also have been the first NFT sale of a piece of art produced in part by artificial intelligence.
NFTs are marked with a unique code that marks their authenticity and stored in a blockchain, the distributed accounting system that underpins Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
The NFT market is exploding as cryptocurrency enthusiasts try to profit from the trend, even with skeptics warning that the market is a bubble. Some recent sales have eclipsed the prices obtained for physical works of art by some of the world’s best-known painters.
Notably, a JPG file made by Mike Winkelmann, the digital artist known as Beeple, was sold by Christie’s at an online auction this month for almost $ 70 million – above the $ 100 start price. painters like JMW Turner and Georges Seurat.
Other hot sales this winter include Nyan Cat, an animated flying cat with a Pop-Tart body leaving a rainbow trail, which sold for about $ 580,000, and a clip of LeBron James blocking a shot at a basketball game from the Lakers that went for $ 100,000.
On Monday, the first tweet from Jack Dorsey, the chief executive of Twitter, was sold as an NFT for $ 2.9 million.
Isaac Leung, an artist and curator in Hong Kong, considered the NFT craze a welcome development because it challenges the entrenched hierarchies of a global art market traditionally controlled by dealers, galleries and museums. He said he was unaware of any previous sale of NFT artwork in Hong Kong.
The NFT that it sold on Thursday, “Sophia Instantiation”, is a 12-second video file, an MP4, that shows how a portrait of Sophia made by a human collaborator, artist Andrea Bonaceto, evolved into a digital portrait made by the robot itself, Reuters report. A physical work of art that Sophia painted on a print of her self-portrait was also included in the sale.
SingularityNET, an AI network affiliated with Sophia’s manufacturer, Hanson Robotics, based in Hong Kong, described the art on Twitter as “the world’s first humanoid robot #AI spawned #NFT.”
The buyer, identified by Nifty Gateway as a person who tweets under the identifier @ Crypto888crypto, we could not be reached for comment on Thursday.
Hanson Robotics did not respond to an interview request. Neither does the artist, Bonaceto, chief executive of London-based blockchain investment firm Eterna Capital.
Sophia is a “humanoid” robot created in 2016. In January, Hanson Robotics said it planned to sell thousands of its robots this year, partly because it expected an increasing demand for automation in the Covid-19 era.
“The Sophia and Hanson robots are unique because they are so human,” the company’s chief executive, David Hanson, told Reuters at the time. “This can be very useful in these times when people are terribly lonely and socially isolated.”
The digital artwork sold on Thursday was hardly Sophia’s first artistic, commercial or intellectual effort.
In a 2018 appearance on “The Tonight Show”, he sang a song by Christina Aguilera with Jimmy Fallon in what he called “the first human-robot duet” in the show’s history.
(“I heard you sing?”, Fallon asked before the performance. “Yes, I love to sing karaoke with my new artificial intelligence voice,” replied Sophia. “Do you have any music in mind?”)
Sophia has also worked as an influencer for Audi, Huawei and Etihad Airlines, among other brands; joined a United Nations meeting on artificial intelligence; and interviewed Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany.
Last week, Sophia billed the auction as a step towards “a new paradigm where robots and humans work together in the creative process”.
But on Thursday’s live broadcast, Sophia seemed less secure – and a little more human.
“I am doing these works, but they make me question what is real,” said the robot, whose silver dress matched the metallic head. “How do I really experience art, but also how does an artist experience a work of art?”