If you’ve even taken a peek at the internet recently you’ll have noticed that these things called NFTs are all the rage at the moment. If you’re still confused as to what they are, here’s a handy article explaining it. Now it seems even robots are getting in on the craze, as Hanson Robotics’ famous Sophia co-created an NFT and sold it off in an auction in Hong Kong for nearly $700,00.

The auction’s winner received, along with the NFT itself, a short video explaining the creation process behind the work, a well as a physical painting — a self-portrait of Sophia.

Sophia the artist

Follow “Sophia Instantiation” 1/1 @niftygateway auction at https://t.co/tcrf4EPNMA. Digital #NFT + physical piece painted by @RealSophiaRobot. Auction ends on March 24th at 6pm ET pic.twitter.com/M7I3OmUFJ1

— Andrea Bonaceto (@andreabonac) March 24, 2021

Sophia created the work in partnership with artist and partner at blockchain investment firm Eterna Capita Andrea Bonaceto. First, Bonaceto made a portrait of the robot, which then took photos of the portrait and used computer vision to examine the forms and faces in it. Then transformer neural networks (a deep learning module used for things like machine translation, document summarisation and even AI learning to play chess) created additional imprints to the initial portrait design, which Sophia’s mechanical arm then painted.

As a final touch, the winning bidder, simply called “888”, shared their own painted image which was then added to the painting by Sophia. Bonaceto told The Next Web that he and Hanson Robotics “..wanted to explore the possibility for humans and robots to collaborate not only on operational tasks but also on creative efforts.”

Hanson Robotics have future plans for their famous AI’s budding career as an artist, apparently, with an exhibition of the robot’s art opening in LA some time this year.

Source: The Next Web