The Global Generative AI Market is growing fast. It accounted for USD 7.9 Billion in 2021 and is projected to occupy a market size of USD 110.8 Billion by 2030 growing by 34.3% every year from 2022 to 2030. This growth is fed by the spectacular rise of Midjourney, DALL-E, and other AI software. More and more artists are experimenting with it, and even people without artistic backgrounds are trying to create artwork.

Is it no surprise that the art world has, as often, been at the forefront of the AI movement. Artists have always been the first to embrace new technological tools, from the Impressionists who were the first to take advantage of tube paint to go out into nature and paint the way they perceived it, to the generative art specialists who, as early as the 1960s, used computers to explore new forms of creation.

”Artists have been experimenting with all new technology, trying to go deeper than the practical and commercial aspects, pushing the boundaries and trying to break the new technology to make us think about the societal impact of a new piece of technology. This is no different with AI.”

A brief history of AI Art

The concept of artificial intelligence as we define it today was popularized in the first half of the 20th century through science fiction, with characters such as the heartless Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz and the humanoid robot that impersonated Maria in Metropolis.

Since then, artificial intelligence has evolved, new technologies emerged, and many artists and researchers began exploring its potential in art.

In parallel with the evolution of AI, AI art, like any discipline, went through different stages. The emergence of new technologies allowed artists to experiment and create new forms.

Early Computer Art (1960s-1970s):

As computers became more accessible, artists and researchers started to experiment with them as a new medium for creating art. Early pioneers, such as Harold Cohen, Frieder Nake, and Vera Molnár, used algorithms and computational techniques to generate art, exploring the possibilities of this new form of creative expression.

The emergence of Fractal Art (1980s):

In the 1980s, fractal geometry, introduced by Benoit Mandelbrot, became a popular method for creating computer-generated art. Fractal art consists of intricate, self-similar patterns and shapes that are generated using mathematical algorithms.

Artists and researchers started using genetic algorithms to evolve and optimize artistic creations. Evolutionary art is a form of AI art that leverages principles of biological evolution, such as mutation and selection, to generate aesthetically pleasing images or designs.

Neural Networks and Deep Learning (2000s-2010s):

With the advent of neural networks and deep learning, AI art began to take on a new dimension. Artists and researchers started to experiment with these techniques to create art that mimics human-like artistic styles or generates novel images from large datasets.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and the AI Art Boom (2010s-present):

In 2014, Ian Goodfellow introduced Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), a type of deep learning algorithm that can generate realistic images by pitting two neural networks against each other. GANs quickly became popular for creating AI art, leading to a boom in AI-generated artworks, such as the famous "Portrait of Edmond de Belamy" by Obvious, which was sold for $432,500 at a Christie's auction in 2018.

If you’d like to experiment with AI and GANs, Playform, a platform created by Ahmed Elgammal, Director of the Art&AI Laboratory and Professor at Rutgers University.

DALL-E 1 Midjourney, the democratization [and recentralization] of AI:

We now just entered into a new phase of AI art: the full democratization of AI. Every artist and even individuals with no creative experience started to create images.

This explosion owes a lot to two software, DALL-E, and Midjourney. The first is a system capable of generating impressive images from a text prompt. DALL-E’s name is inspired by the painter Salvador Dalì and the Disney character WALL-E. This June, the updated version, DALL-E 2, generated a lot of attention.

Midjourney is the other most popular tool for AI creatives. It is an artificial intelligence that allows generating images from short textual descriptions. This innovative technology was created by a small independent research team exploring new ways of thinking and imagining.

The software recently launched version 5, which adds more realism and detail to the generated images. This improved version allows for more true-to-life results.

This seems far from over. During the next months, we will see higher-quality AI-made images. Moreover, we are already seeing the emergence of AI video generators. It's a tsunami of creation that we are about to witness.

News headlines have also extensively covered the idea of the disappearance of artists due to the new powerful tools available to make illustrations and the question of the future of stock photography. If it’s great to get these tools accessible to more people, it also poses the question of recentralization of machine learning on very few corporation-controlled algorithms that are not trained anymore on small sets of data but on the entire Internet, raising red flags that have been covered recently in the news.

5 Artists to watch

Investment-wise, we believe that it is the perfect time to start exploring the market to find some good opportunities. There are plenty of exciting AI artists out there, and they will be more and more. But as with any art genre, there will be a handful of very good artists, many good artists but also many bad ones.

The AI art world is experiencing a strong bull market, with all signs pointing toward its sustained growth and popularity for this handful of early artists who adopted AI as a tool on their palette.

For collectors looking to capitalize on this trend, focusing on established artists is a sound investment strategy. These trailblazers not only demonstrate exceptional talent but are also poised to reap the benefits of this burgeoning genre.

Among the notable names in AI art, five artists stand out for their potential to see their popularity soar in the coming years: Refik Anadol, Agoria, Obvious, Claire Silver, and Jenni Pasanen. These visionaries are pushing the boundaries of creativity and technology, captivating audiences with their unique styles and innovative approaches to art.

Besides these artists, a lot of talented creators can be found on platforms such as OBJKT and fx(hash) on the Tezos blockchain. Artworks here tend to be cheaper than on Ethereum art platforms such as SuperRare and KnownOrigin.

Artists also usually sell their artworks on their own website, following the Web3 idea of decentralization and direct artist to collector relationships.

Refik Anadol

Refik Anadol is a Turkish-American new media artist and designer born in 1985. He is internationally recognized for his work in the field of media art and is considered a pioneer of artificial intelligence aesthetics.

Anadol lives and works in Los Angeles, where he owns and directs Refik Anadol Studio and RAS LAB, a research center focused on discovering and developing new technologies. Refik has become a leader in contemporary media art through his use of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine algorithms, and quantum computing to create immersive installations and sculptures.

The Turkish-American artist uses datasets and AI models to create fascinating "living paintings". One of his most fascinating projects is "Machine Hallucinations: MoMA," where he used a machine learning model to interpret visual and informational data from the Museum of Modern Art in New York's collection.

Anadol also created the Synthetic Dreams, Landscapes series. The series was executed in collaboration with the Google Quantum AI team and inspired by the Quantum Advantage research data which was published in Nature. These generative and multidimensional AI data paintings are based on a unique training set consisting of 200 million raw images of landscapes from around the world, including images of all the national parks in the world.

Refik is considered one of the most important artificial intelligence artists due to his innovative approach to integrating cutting-edge technologies in art, allowing him to create visually striking and conceptually profound works. His work explores the symbiosis and tension between humans and machines and demonstrates how AI can be used as a creative tool for both amateur and professional artists.

Agoria

Immerse yourself in the fascinating world of Agoria, born Sébastien Devaud in 1976, a visionary French electronic record producer, composer, DJ, and NFT artist who defies boundaries.

Since embarking on his musical journey in the late '90s, Agoria has explored the digital art realm, creating captivating NFT masterpieces that ignite the imagination. Agoria started on OBJKT in November 2021, with his {Compendia} series. In 2022, Agoria minted his first artwork on SuperRare. Created in collaboration with biologist Alice Meunier, 'Centriole' explored the process of the formation of organelles in living cells in the brain.

Agoria's relentless curiosity and limitless creativity have led him to collaborate with Oscar-winning designer Nicolas Becker and ingenious bio-physicist Nicolas Desprat. Together, they have conceived "Phytocene," an immersive NFT experience that harmoniously blends bioscience and music, guiding us on a remarkable journey through the inner workings of nature.

With a unique fusion of music, science, and visual artistry, Agoria continues to establish himself as a pioneering force in the ever-evolving NFT art landscape.

Obvious

The three members of the French collective “Obvious” can be considered pioneers in the AI art field. Pierre Fautrel, Hugo Caselles-Dupré, and Gauthier Vernier started experimenting with NFTs as soon as 2018. They confront the history of art with new AI techniques, using algorithms to generate intriguing images.

“Our mission is to reconcile science and art by showing that the history of the latter is linked to the history of the progression of tools. Next, we question the place of AI in our society. Is it creative? Inventive? How do people react to it?”, explains Pierre Fautrel.

They made their mark in art history on October 25, 2018, by becoming the first artists to sell a work created by artificial intelligence through the prestigious auction house Christie's. 'Edmond de Belamy' sold for $432,000. To create this unfinished portrait of a fictional member of the 19th-century bourgeoisie, the software assimilated, analyzed, and synthesized more than 15,000 portraits dating from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. The outputs of this image generator were then submitted to a second software responsible for optimizing their rendering to the point that they can no longer be differentiated from a human-made creation.

In the bottom right corner, instead of the artist’s signature, the mathematical formula of the algorithm is displayed, inviting people to question who created this painting. But Obvious **did not maintain this price level at auction: the maximum price recorded since then has been $25,000 for La Baronne de Belamy (2018), from the same series (Sotheby’s New York; 15/11/2019)

Their last project, “7.1”, is a series based on antique text to recreate the seven wonders of the ancient world. It was displayed at Danyzs Gallery in Paris, for what was the first solo show of the collective.

Claire Silver

Silver is an AI art pioneer making history as her cutting-edge post-photography technique challenges traditional notions of art. Her work blurs the lines between the physical and digital. As she explains, her art “questions the themes of vulnerability, trauma, disability, social hierarchy, innocence, and divinity, and questions the role they will play in our transhumanist future”.

Silver's NFTs gained significant attention in the art world last year when they were displayed at Sotheby's contemporary art day auction. This recognition continued as her work became a part of LACMA's permanent collection. Silver is not the only artist making an impact in the NFT space. Her peers have not only earned substantial revenues but have also had their work exhibited in prestigious galleries like Pace and added to the collections of major museums such as the Palais de Tokyo and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.

“It follows my life from childhood poverty in a cornfield town to the current digital reality I’m living and focuses on cultivating a sense of intimacy between artist, viewer, and tool. One of the arguments I see used against AI-Collaborative work is that it’s ‘soulless,'” Silver writes in her artist statement. “I see AI as liberation, as an extension of the imagination, deeply personal, inexorable from the artist using it. I want this collection to challenge the notion of the machine overpowering the humanity inherent to art.”

Claire Silver’s last drop is a series created for Bright Moments, a DAO building a collection of generative & AI art.

Jenni Pasanen

Jenni Pasanen is a Finnish digital artist who combines digital painting with AI to create unprecedented and fascinating works of art.

With a lifelong background in art, she has experience in various forms such as acrylic painting, clay sculpting, sewing, animation, and coding. She has been painting digitally for about 15 years, with a background in design and animation. She began pursuing her dream of becoming a full-time artist towards the end of 2021 and exhibited her works globally the following year.

Her artistic direction drastically changed when she discovered AI art two years ago and has since been exploring ways to merge AI technology with her digital paintings, resulting in surreal illustrations with an ethereal aesthetic.

Jenni finds her inspiration in the world around her, using art as a mirror and a means of self-expression.

Pasanen's painting is futuristic. By using generative adversarial networks, she creates unprecedented and fascinating pieces. "Each piece is a patchwork sewn from our own experiences of the past, present, and future, from the imagination of who was there and what could be there”.

Anne Spalter

About: Anne Spalter is a leading digital artist who creates dystopian landscapes with AI and other tools. The Anne and Michael Spalter Digital Art Collection (Spalter Digital) is one of the world’s largest private collections of early computer art, comprising over 1000 works from the second half of the twentieth century.

Recent collections: Her work can be found on Superrare, Sovrn Art, and many more. The Peer to Peer show, curated by Tina Rivers Ryan, showcased her work The Bell Machine, which has been acquired by the Buffalo AKG Museum of Art

Links: https://annespalter.com/ | https://twitter.com/annespalter

Pindar Van Aman

About: Pindar has been using a robotic machine and AI to create mind-blowing portraits both physical and digital that can be found on Superrare. He sits at the board of the Superrare DAO Council (with me ;)) and founded the AI art platform, sovrn.art.

Recent collections: His portraits evolved into BitGANS, pixel art evolution of the robot output that he as a human tries to document and comprehend.

Links: https://www.cloudpainter.com/ | https://twitter.com/VanArman

David Young

About: David Young has been experimenting with GANs and teaching about AI for decades. Based in New York state, he trains GANs on very small datasets of his own photographs of nature, flowers and trees. He pushes the limit of GANs, trying to break them or train them only on black and white to see how a machine can learn about new colors. Recently he’s been experimenting with Quantum Technology!

Recent collections: His work can be found on Superrare. His newsletter is full of reflexions about AI art and what we can learn from artists about the risks of AI. http://davidyoungart.substack.com/

Links: https://davidyoung.art/ | https://www.instagram.com/david.young._/

There are brilliant emerging artists who are using AI in artistic domains that are beyond the image twisting and remixing that I’d like to mention. All adventurous collectors eager to get ahead of the trends will appreciate these pointers. We hope to widen your horizon and understanding of AI art.

Sasha Stiles: AI & poetry

Sasha is an artist and AI researcher widely recognized as a pioneer of generative literature and language art. Her work explores what it means to be human in a nearly posthuman era. ****Sasha Stiles published the book, Technelegy, written with an AI alter ego. She is the co-founder of theVERSEverse, the home of blockchain and poetry. She has produced successful NFT collections on various curated platforms and is widely collected.

Links: https://www.sashastiles.com/ | https://twitter.com/sashastiles

Danielle King: AI & portraits

Danielle is a collector, the COO of ClubNFT + Right Click Save and an artist exploring the emotional side of AI via her series of portraits, from her vintage AI Women series on Objkt to her more recent Muse Collection on Emprops and AI+Memory exhibit at Expanded Art.

Links: https://danielle-king.com/ | https://twitter.com/Rrose_Selavy_11

Encapsuled: AI & alphabet

Encapsuled (aka Michelangelo) is an Italian artist and writer who is exploring the intersection of writing, alphabets and AI. His Artblocks drop in 2022, Your Story, explores the creation of an alphabet and a participatory book via AI, similarly to other series like Manifesto realized in collaborating with Breezy Art or Chronicles with VerticalCrypto Art.

Links: https://encapsuled.xyz/ | https://twitter.com/encapsuled_

Mikey Woodridge, AI & Fashion: https://www.latentcouture.art/

Mikey Woodridge, a musician, DJ, fashion photographer and AI researchers, released LATENT COUTURE on Svrn Art, a collection of 555 AI fashion statements generated from his own fashion photographs, producing new groundbreaking looks.

Links: https://www.mikeywoodbridge.com/ | https://twitter.com/mikeywoodbridge

Albertine Meunier: AI & Sausages

Albertine Meunier is a French conceptual artist who is exploring the absurd aspect of the art market via humor, technology and a very personal style. She has been releasing a series of AI portraits called HyperChips on Objkt using the DALL-E prompt "albertine meunier is eating sausages and chips”

Links: https://www.albertinemeunier.net/ | https://twitter.com/albertinmeunier