Botto is a decentralized autonomous AI artist created by Mario Klingemann together with ElevenYellow, Carbono and Collección SOLO, launched in October 2021. Its images are generated by AI models and selected through weekly votes by BottoDAO, the token-holding community that guides its aesthetic direction, with the winning work minted and auctioned on SuperRare.
Botto's Genesis Period ran from its October 2021 launch to October 2022, during which BottoDAO minted 52 weekly works on SuperRare. Its early images combined VQGAN, which generates images without text prompts, and CLIP, which does, an approach popularized by Katherine Crowson. This pairing let the project avoid the hyperrealism and deepfakes associated with earlier GAN-based art. Each week, prompt generators fed open-source text-to-image models to produce tens of thousands of candidate images, and Botto's own taste model narrowed the pool to the most promising works for the community to review.









