At this time, NFT or “non-fungible token,” is the hype that caught the world by storm.
After Elon Musk's partner, Grimes, managed to sell some of her artworks for million of dollars by making them NFT items, the NFT craze continued with a bunch of others.
It also gained the attention of Jack Dorsey, Twitter founder and CEO, when he made the first-ever tweet as an NFT item for sale.
And among other NFTs that went up for sale, some cryptocurrency enthusiasts even went as far as burning a real art piece, to make its NFT worth higher, and a hacker was reportedly selling the first NFT for software exploit.
The craze continues, and among others, artist Krista Kim @kristakim has sold a digital house for the equivalent of $500,000.
And this time apparently, not only humans want to cash in on the craze.
Sophia the robot was developed by Hong Kong-based company Hanson Robotics, and first came to life on February 14, 2016.
Since then, Sophia has been overstated in many presentations.
For example, in 2017, she became the first ever robot that received citizenship. Sophia that has a "porcelain skin," "slender nose" and "intriguing smile," is Saudi Arabian.
This time, she too is cashing in to the NFT hype, when an artwork she co-created was sold for almost $700,000 at an auction in Hong Kong.
The winning bidder, who is a unnamed digital artist that goes with the name '888', took home a 12-second MP4 file showing how the work evolved, as well as a physical “self-portrait” of the humanoid Sophia.
Once the auction ended, 888 shared a hand-painted image that was fused into the final painting through a few of Sophia’s brushstrokes.
“A hand and an arm packed with color and gesture,” said Sophia’s creator, David Hanson. “It’s 888’s choice of image meeting Sophia’s choice of image.”
I want to thank the universe so much for allowing me win the auction and actually collaborate with @RealSophiaRobot
The fact she used my painting to finish her piece is beyond anything I could ever wish for
I can’t quite get over what just happened https://t.co/sG7ysibu7W— 888 (@Crypto888crypto) March 24, 2021
Sophia made the images with Andrea Bonaceto, an artist and partner at blockchain investment firm Eterna Capital, who’s best-known for creating vectorial portraits of celebrities.
“We wanted to explore the possibility for humans and robots to collaborate not only on operational tasks but also on creative efforts,” said Bonaceto before the auction took place.
The partnership began when Bonaceto created a painting of Sophia.
In the partnership, the creator of Sophia took the photos Bonaceto has taken, to then applied AI-powered computer vision to analyze the face and forms inside the portraits. After that, Sophia's creator used transformer neural networks to generate new imprints, which were then given to Sophia for her robotic arm to paint.
While NFT has been available for quite a while, the market for NFT artworks has erupted tremendously in 2021.
Beside the aforementioned sales, another notable sale was when a graphic designer who goes by the name of Beeple sold a digital image with an NFT for a staggering $69.3 million. This was considered the third most expensive sale ever from a living artist, coming only after David Hockney and Jeff Koons.
The opening bid for Beeple’s collage of a collage of 5,000 images was a mere $100.
His response at the time, was tweeting: “holy fuck.”
Read: NFT For JPEG Artwork Of Collage Images Was Sold For $69 Million
