Botto art system shares control between community and algorithms
Who Chooses the Artwork? Curatorial Agency and Distributed Intent in Botto
Human-Computer Interaction
Summary
Creating art with AI isn't just about making images. The paper looks at Botto, an AI art project where computers and people work together to choose which artworks become real. People vote and guide the art direction, but the AI's design decides what art gets shown and accepted. This shows that understanding AI art means looking at both how models create images and how humans and systems select and showcase art.
What this means in practice
- •For digital art platform developers: Design AI-driven art platforms that integrate user voting and governance to guide art selection alongside algorithmic curation.
- •For content moderation teams: Develop procedures to explain how digital content is curated by combining algorithmic filters with community decisions.
A position paper. It proposes an approach and reports no results.
Authors
Haoting Alexa Yu, Bea Wohl
Abstract
Botto is often described as a decentralized autonomous artist, but its authorship cannot be located in image generation alone. This paper examines Botto as an agentic curatorial system in which generation, ranking, voting, feedback, and minting form a recursive loop. Drawing on Botto's documentation and prior accounts of the project, we argue that agency in Botto is distributed but asymmetrical: community participants influence artistic direction through voting and governance, while Botto's internal models structure which images become visible, selectable, and recognizable as works. The case shows that, for AI art systems, explainability should include not only model behavior but also the curatorial procedures through which outputs acquire artistic status.