Eponym NFTs by Art AI: Turning Words into NFTs with AI
by Justin Perri
10/14/2021
On Sunday, October 10, NFT Twitter started buzzing about a new NFT project called Eponym. The project, hosted on art-ai.com, greets you with a simple and effective prompt: “Turn words into NFTs.” Minting of the first 10,000 editions completed by the end of Sunday, but while active a visitor to the site could enter any string of characters in order to produce artwork generated by artificial intelligence software.
These 10,000 editions, each minted at .08Ξ, are now immortalized as the genesis Eponyms by ART AI.
Producing an Eponym NFT
Each submission to the minting site took about a minute to load, but once the AI had completed, you were greeted by a new and unique work of art. The project uses a text-to-image generation algorithm to produce an abstract pictorial representation of the given prompt. Results ranged from highly abstract, to landscapes and portraits, all depending on the word that was entered.
Phrases of action created chaotic representations, locations often produced landscapes with scenery similar to that of its real world appearance, and portraits were mainly born from names of people. For example, below is ‘mozart’ as an Eponym, which sold for 3.5Ξ on October 13.
These computer-made artworks represented the project title well, as an eponym is a person for which something is named. The easiest example of this is Disneyland for which Walt Disney would be the eponym, etc. But in essence, what this team had created was a system where the collector was providing the words, or eponym, and was returned a computer generated artistic interpretation bred directly from the AI’s general understanding of the phrase.
NFT Art Curated by Community
The most notable part of the project was that you were able to refresh the algorithm and ask for a new representation of the word or phrase that the creation was born from! This expanded the possibilities from one single depiction of your prompt to an endless number, as you could keep rolling until you found the Eponym you wanted to mint. Once art was rerolled, it would never exist again.
The simple permission to allow for a redo opened the door for the collector to have an equal role in the creation alongside the artificial intelligence. Instead of accepting what you were given or choosing a new word, each person could use their own style to search for an image that they felt properly connected to what they potentially imagined.
Personally Connecting with Eponym NFTs
Reception to Eponym in the NFT community has been that of intrigue and excitement. These are NFTs that have the artistic approval of those who paid to own them! The majority of projects currently available play the mint lottery game, and Eponym added a re-roll feature.
The project has drawn praise from some of the more well-known NFT art collectors, analysts, influencers and personalities in the NFT space. The main comment has been that the minting process was unlike any other project, and above all else, it was fun to be able to choose the art you ultimately own.
The secondary market becomes a new experience as well. With Eponym you are browsing the selected works from the algorithm rather than the random output the smart contract normally sticks you with when minting a classic profile picture project.
Someone somewhere decided that they would mint the iteration you’re considering purchasing; they may have looked at five more options or maybe minted the first one. All of it is part of the art of this collection that has been created together by the community and the algorithms.
What’s Next for Eponyms
The ART AI team released a roadmap three days after minting finished, and shared their vision for the future of Eponyms They discussed an upcoming swapping mechanism where you can trade in two Eponyms in order to choose a new word as part of the ‘Gen. 2’ Collection.
It was also confirmed that the properties of the current set of NFTs would be revealed within a week of the roadmap’s publishing, consistent with messaging on their Discord. These object properties will include the style, content, colors, number of words, and possibly more.
There is also a hint to future perks, including being able to attain a high resolution copy of your Eponym, and physical art collectibles — whatever that might mean.
You can collect and trade Eponyms on OpenSea here: Eponym by ART AI – Collection. You can dig into past sales, top holders, and more data about Eponyms on MomentRanks.