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Humans wanting to play God: The machine artist Botto produces 7,000 works a week, challenging traditional notions of authorship, creativity, and agency. But it doesn’t work alone—its evolution and output are guided by a global community that votes on which final pieces are worthy of becoming art. Simon Hudson, who oversees the strategic direction of the project, explains how Botto is a microcosm of the global debate on AI governance.
What does an AI artist look like when it has a community, a governance structure, and an evolving aesthetic sensibility? Botto is the answer - and Simon Hudson is the person who built the systems that make it function. As co-founder of Big Atlantic and the mind behind Botto's technical and conceptual architecture, he has spent more time than anyone thinking about what it means for a machine to develop a practice.
Simon Hudson is the co-founder of Big Atlantic and one of the key architects of Botto - the autonomous AI artist that generates thousands of images weekly and relies on a community of $BOTTO token holders to vote on which works become minted artworks. His background combines deep technical expertise with genuine philosophical curiosity about creativity, authorship, and the relationship between algorithmic systems and human aesthetic judgment. He has helped build one of the most sophisticated experiments in AI art production and community curation currently running.
Botto raises the most important question in AI art in the most concrete possible way: if a machine generates work that a community consistently finds beautiful, meaningful, and worth owning - what does that say about creativity? Simon Hudson doesn't try to answer this definitively. Instead, he has built a system that keeps the question open and running, producing new data every week about the relationship between algorithmic generation and human judgment. This conversation explores the architecture of that system - how Botto learns, how the community shapes its development, and what three years of this experiment have revealed.
Botto's governance as creative collaboration
The $BOTTO token holders who vote on images are not just selecting from Botto's output - they are shaping the direction of its development. Botto's aesthetic sensibility evolves in response to community preferences, making the relationship genuinely reciprocal.
The autonomous artist as ongoing experiment
Botto is not a product or a platform - it's an experiment that never ends. Each week's generation is a new data point, and the accumulation of those data points over time produces something that looks, increasingly, like an evolving practice.
AI creativity and the question of authorship
Hudson has thought carefully about whether Botto is an artist in a meaningful sense - and his answer is more nuanced than either enthusiasts or sceptics tend to produce. The experiment is designed to resist premature closure on the question.
Community curation as aesthetic system
The voting mechanism is not just a selection tool - it's an aesthetic argument. Over time, the preferences that emerge through Botto's community reveal things about collective taste and shared aesthetic values that couldn't be captured through any individual's judgment.
Botto is one of the most important ongoing experiments in AI art - and understanding how it works will sharpen your thinking about AI authorship, community curation, and what you're actually valuing when you collect machine-generated work. If you've been following the AI art conversation, this is where that conversation gets most rigorous.
Unlocked is the podcast by 100 collectors - the global network for digital art collectors. Each episode, we speak with artists, curators, collectors, and builders shaping the digital art world. No market speculation. No hype. Just honest, substantive conversations about art, practice, and what it means to collect today. New episodes release throughout the year. Find Unlocked on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. 100 collectors is a membership network. [Explore membership →]
