Hoffman is making NFT art to sell on Magic Eden’s auction site by using OpenAI’s AI-powered image rendering platform.
Reid Hoffman is a billionaire tech entrepreneur who is best known for co-founding the business networking site LinkedIn. He is releasing a series of Solana-based NFTs based on images he makes with OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 artificial intelligence software.
Hoffman wrote about the plan on Twitter today and said that he would start selling the first piece today on Magic Eden, which is the biggest Solana NFT marketplace.
The project, called Untranslatable Words, will include 11 pieces of tokenized art that were made by DALL-E 2, a program that makes art based on words.
“Anyone can ‘right-click-save’ the original DALL-E file and make as many copies as they want,” he wrote. “Enter NFTs, a way to make a digital asset scarce and unique that can be proven. What happens when you put together two of the most important changes in technology? How could they get along?”
Inspired by the potential of DALL•E and NFTs — and the possibilities that they unleash together — my team and I have created a number of small image collections that we’ll be tokenizing as NFTs.
The first collection debuts on Magic Eden today.
Here’s why I’m experimenting:
— Reid Hoffman (@reidhoffman) July 21, 2022
“Nagata,” the first piece in the collection, is up for auction, and the highest bid so far is 12 SOL, which is about $517. The Magic Eden page says that the Swedish word means “the road-like reflection of the moon on water.” Hoffman wrote that he was inspired by “words that exist in another language that has no single-word equivalent in your own language.”
He plans to give some of the money made from each piece to charities and give the rest to his team. Any NFTs that aren’t bought during the auctions will be burned, which means they will be gone for good.
An NFT is a blockchain token that can be used to prove ownership of something, like a piece of art, a collectible, or an item in a video game. The NFT market grew a lot in 2021, with about $25 billion worth of trades. So far this year, another $20 billion has been traded.
Since April, when the latest version of OpenAI’s platform was announced, there has been a lot of sharing of images of DALL-E 2. The software makes different pieces of art based on the text that the user gives it. The results can be surprisingly accurate, even when the user combines words that have nothing to do with each other.
Even though OpenAI’s technology has a lot of potentials, it also needs well-thought-out rules to prevent abuse and bias.
OpenAI didn’t let people sell images made by DALL-E 2 until yesterday because the project was still in a “preview” release state. The terms and conditions of the project even say that NFTs can’t be sold. This is written in the project’s documentation.
But yesterday, OpenAI released a new beta version that gives creators of images the right to sell their work, which seems to make Hoffman’s NFT project possible. He is on the board of OpenAI. On his LinkedIn page, he has written a lot about DALL-E.
“Without technology, there is no visual expression,” Hoffman wrote on Wednesday. “Great artists have always come up with new ideas. If Da Vinci, Pablo Picasso, Georgia O’Keefe, and Frida Kahlo were still alive today, I’m sure they’d be trying out DALL-E.”
