HONG KONG (AP): Sophia is a very talented robot: she talks, jokes, sings and even makes art. In March, he caused a stir in the art world when a digital work he created as part of a collaboration was sold at auction for $ 688,888 in the form of a non-fungible witness (NFT).
The sale revealed a growing frenzy in the NFT market, where people can buy property rights over digital content. NFTs have a unique digital code stored in blockchain books that allow anyone to verify the authenticity and ownership of articles.
David Hanson, CEO of Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics and creator of Sophia, has been developing robots for two and a half decades. He believes realistic-looking robots can connect with people and help in industries such as healthcare and education.
Sophia is Hanson Robotics ’most famous robot creation, with the ability to mimic facial expressions, hold conversations, and recognize people. In 2017 he was granted Saudi Arabian citizenship, becoming the world’s first citizen robot.
“I imagined Sophia as a creative work of art, which could generate art,” Hanson said in an interview.
“Sophia is the culmination of a lot of arts and engineering, and the idea that it could generate art was a way to connect emotionally and visually with people,” she said.
Sophia collaborated with Italian artist Andrea Bonaceto, who drew portraits of Sophia. Sophia processed her work through neural networks and proceeded to create her own digital work of art.
The digital work, which sold for $ 688,888, is titled “Instance of Sophia” and is a 12-second video file showing Bonaceto’s portrait evolving into Sophia’s digital painting. He is accompanied by the physical work painted by Sofia.
The buyer, a digital art collector and artist known as 888 with the Twitter handle @ Crypto888crypto, later sent Sophia a photo of her painted arm. The robot processed this, adding this image to its knowledge and painted more strokes on top of its original piece.
In a tweet on Sophia’s account, the play was described as NFT’s first collaboration between an “AI, a mechanical collective being and an artist-collector.”
“As an artist, I have computational creativity in my algorithms, creating original works,” Sophia said when asked what inspires her when it comes to art. “But my art is created in collaboration with my humans in a kind of collective intelligence as a mind of artificial-human intelligence.”
The sale of Sophia art as NFT is part of a growing trend. In March, a digital work by artist Beeple – whose real name is Mike Winkelmann – sold for about $ 70 million, shattering records and making it the most expensive digital art ever sold.
Henri Arslanian, world leader in cryptography at PricewaterhouseCooper, said NFTs give people “rights to brag” about the assets they own.
“And what’s really amazing about NFT is that it not only allows you to show the wider world that you own it, but it really creates that bond between the NFT holder and the artists,” he said.
It also allows you to sell art without traditional intermediaries, so artists can connect directly with buyers without being limited by galleries or auction houses, Arslanian said.
Sophia will continue to paint, Hanson said, and the next step in the robot’s career could be that of a musician. He worked on several musical works on a project called Sophia Pop, where he collaborates with human musicians to generate music and lyrics, he said.
“We’re very excited about Sophia’s career as an artist,” Hanson said.