gm Insane to think it’s now been 5 years since my life was forever changed by the release of Fidenza by @tylerxhobbs. I’m forever grateful for the financial freedom it gave me and the opportunity it provided to step into this space full time. It’s still unfathomable to think that something I minted for 0.17 ETH would go on to sell for 250 ETH just months later. But more importantly, the friendships that came out of it and the impact it had on the way we view art moving forward are what I value above all else. I didn’t mint my Fidenza thinking I’d be able to sell it for life-changing money a few months later. In fact, I thought it would be at least 5–10 years before anyone really cared about the project, or this breakthrough medium that uses code itself as the canvas. Fidenza changed my perception of what’s possible and, on its artistic merits alone, will withstand the test of time. But its importance goes far beyond anything I could have imagined. More than anything, though, this anniversary is a celebration of Tyler and the impact he has had on the space. His artistic vision helped define an entire movement, and I’m incredibly grateful not only for the work he created, but for the friendship that followed. Despite the market taking many turns since then, I’m more convicted today than I was 5 years ago. The lesson I keep coming back to is the importance of thinking beyond the short term. When I minted Fidenza, I wasn’t thinking about quick profits. I was thinking about the bigger picture and what the project represented. Zoom out. Believe in something. Support the people building the future you want to see. That’s how conviction is formed. This is how we build.

We never left 🫡

This 1968 artwork "Interruptions" by Vera Molnár is one of the earliest and most powerful predecessors to today’s generative AI art. Using punch cards and FORTRAN, she programmed perfect algorithmic order then deliberately added randomness and interruptions to create organic chaos. It’s exactly the same core idea we now explore with AI models, only 55 years earlier /1

I benchmarked 7 AI models on @artblocks_io knowledge. Results: - Opus 4.6: 57% - o3: 56% - GPT-4.1: 46% - Sonnet 4.6: 42% - DeepSeek V3: 40% - Haiku 4.5: 36% - Llama 4 Scout: 24% Built an RL training environment on @PrimeIntellect's hub: 207 questions across 12 categories. Project-to-artist lookups, edition sizes, script libraries, on-chain traits, contract addresses, platform mechanics. Zero-shot, no tools. 57% ceiling across two model families. Every model fails on the same things: project indices, script types for non-famous projects, recent mints, MCP tool knowledge. The stuff you can't get from a blog post. We launched the Art Blocks MCP a couple weeks ago: structured API access for agents to browse and transact generative art. The environment is the other half: it's how you make agents actually good at it. Environment is live on the Prime Intellect hub if you want to run your own evals or train against it. app.primeintellect.ai/dashbo…

Touch some virtual grass in Nifty Island. You need it 🏝️ The metaverse is for healing.

There's already flourishing scene of artists who are using AI to create art, as well as collectors who respect and value the art they create. Some artists use generative AI tools to bring to life the seeds of imaginary worlds and ecosystems they have been harbouring. (e.g. Auntieverse by @niceaunties, The Vault of Wonders by @edbyus) Others deploy them to confront established mediums like photography and videomaking, and forge novel compositions out of their materials. (e.g. Life in West America by @rainisto, Terrestrial Factors by @bagdelete, Real! by @BennettWaisbren) Or to remix our forgotten visual heritage and breath new life into older artistic traditions. (e.g. Empire by @sheldrick_ai, Relic and Muraqqa by @orkhan) Then there are also artists who tap on AI to interrogate the broader techno-economic and social structures that mediate or determine our visual culture. (e.g. xhairymutantx by @hollyherndon and @matdryhurst, Critically Extant by @soficrespo91, Bloemenveiling by @annaridler and @pfau) And those who were early to "see" from the perspective of the machine, sculpting datasets from the ground up to test their expressive potential and explore previously unseen spaces within (e.g. DeepDream by @zzznah, A Book from the Sky by @genekogan, Realiti by @tyaagnliu) Or intentionally directing AI to excavate and reveal the inherent contingency of our visual media. (e.g. Learning to See by @memoakten, Evolved Hallucinations by @trevorpaglen) There are also artists who use AI against the grain. (e.g. @kev_esh stopping the diffusion process prematurely in In Utero and I'm With You, or @Terrybroad implementing GANs without any training data in (un)stable equilibrium). And those who embraced the inherent multimodality of AI to build bridges across different senses, mediums and languages. (e.g. Being Borges by @CaballeroAnaMa, Blind Camera by @dtpisanty). Or push the creative potential of AI decisively into the physical realm via robotics. (e.g. Emerging Faces by @VanArman, Drawing Operations by @sougwen) We also can't forget those who were at the cutting edge of AI research, creating artefacts that eventually take on the aura of artworks. (e.g. alignDRAW by @elmanmansimov) And of course, AI-based artworks with incredible lore, emerging from the ash heap of rejection and catapulting into a life of its own as a positional asset. (e.g. The Lost Robbies by @videodrome) Neither can we ignore those who attempt to nurture non-human artists with AI who can make their own creative decisions autonomously, often tapping on crypto-economic affordances to finance their practice. (e.g. @bottoproject by @BottoDAO and @quasimondo, @abraham_ai_ by @genekogan, @DeepBlackAI, @keke_terminal by @dark_sando, @hi_flynn) This is just a non-exhaustive stream-of-consciousness outline of some of the artists whose use of AI tools I've been inspired by. There are definitely many more who elude my faculties of immediate recollection, and I'm certainly biased by my aesthetic preferences and conceptual inclinations. Nevertheless, my point is that in spite of the prevailing cultural propaganda, there are already many artists seriously and credibly engaging with AI. And I agree with you, it's truly beautiful to behold.

Everyone’s talking about AI. Few are collecting the actual legacy. Early AI Art is the blueprint collect it before the institutions catch up.

Due to popular demand, here is your guide to collecting digital art with the great @batsoupyum... Enjoy!

With Animoca Brands, your future shines bright! These four together? Just the beginning. RT/QRT now — something special is coming for the early birds. 👀

Early AI Art masterpieces weren’t created for market, for followers, or for liquidity. They were created for exploration, visual, philosophical, and computational. And because they were born before the market’s gaze, they remain pure for it.

Art Blocks today is a very different organization than it was just a year ago. And the stuff we are working on and thinking about reflects that. In fact, pretty soon @artblocks_io will feel very different than it has up until now, in various ways. We have already made a bunch of changes and progress this year, but lots more to come, both functionally and conceptually. One big step towards that is a (candidly long overdue) collector profile. One that aggregates all your wallets and brings your Art Blocks collection, from our six flagship collections (Curated, Factory, Playground, Presents, Explorations, and Collaborations) to everything Studio and Engine (still only L1 ETH for now), to one place. Email login. Recognized achievements and honors. Preliminary set building (starting with also long overdue Curated Series 1–8 and expanding as it makes sense). Embedded wallets and, soon, simple showcase functionality. This went live today. Take a moment and check it out and claim some achievements (bonus points if you can tell me the inspiration for the animation you see when claiming your achievements). Really just a starting point that puts us in a position to both celebrate the past and embrace the future. In general, it is likely that we see a major transformation not just at Art Blocks, but across this ecosystem and in a lot of tech in general. I’m personally super excited about the future and simultaneously terrified by the rapid pace of change. But very much here for it. Super excited about how initiatives like PostParams will play a role in giving Art Blocks and creators that release on AB the flexibility to explore new territory. Anyways, I know it’s a bit tough and dreary out there. But we are still here. Building. Thinking. Staying true to ourselves and what we set out to do in the first place. And we are not going anywhere. Huge, huge thanks to the team for the tremendous amount of thought and work and polish and dialogue and research that led to this update. I’m personally just so damn proud to work with each and every one of them, and grateful for their passion for what we do. Hope y’all enjoy these and all the upcoming updates. 🍻

🗓️ 4 YEARS AGO TODAY (May 21 2021) Frammenti by @stefan_contiero was released on Art Blocks Curated. Vivid shards of on-chain memory 🎨✨ Explore the full collection here 👇 artblocks.io/collection/fram…

We should have seen the $COIN S&P 500 listing coming from miles away…

Gm Flowers ! Updated @artblocks_io website is really clean and now really gives credit to art. Thanks for the good work. #generativeart

🧨🧨🧨BIG SWEEP ALERT🧨🧨🧨 13 DeepBlack AI Paintings were sold. opensea.io/0x2572dcf75299b36…