The Bored Apes Yacht Club is almost the face of NFTs on the internet. It’s a collection of over 10000 Bored Apes NFTs, or basically that many variations of ape images. If you’re not particularly invested in NFTs but just want to see more Bored Apes out on the internet, that’s what machine learning enthusiast Yannic Kilcher has done. He has built an AI that can generate more apes.
Kilcher has put up the process on his own YouTube channel. As he explains, he made the AI using a technique known as Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). The process effectively involves two neural networks, one to generate an image and the other to differentiate the generated image from a real image. The process is essentially an arms race between a forger and an authenticator. And at the end, you have a generator that can create very convincing fakes.
And that’s basically the whole idea behind the AI that generates these fungible apes. They’re made to seem like they could be from the actual NFT collection, it’s just that they’re not. Kilcher claims that, with his AI, it will generate any particular ape only once. Refresh the page and you’ll get a different ape that’s never been generated by the AI before.
Kilcher has also provided a link so that you can try it yourself. He also strongly suggests you hit the download button for a funny jab at the whole nonfungibility of NFTs.
(Source: Yannic Kilcher [1], [2] via TNW)
