🍝 Meet Spaghetty (#94)

The generative art AI assistant you didn't know you needed.

Author

Craig Wilson
October 27, 2023

DYOR 🔬

This week, we were honored to be able to reveal a project that’s been months in the making. Earlier this year, we commissioned digital artist Fahad Karim — shortlisted for this year’s inaugural Metaversal Generative Art Award from the Lumen Prize — to create a generative artwork for our collection.

The result is a 1/1 artwork entitled, “Would you like some assistance today?” (WYLSAT) The star of the work is an AI-powered generative art assistant named Spaghetty, and we invite you to interact with it, create a work of your own, and possibly learn something about yourself and your relationship with artificial intelligence in the process.

If Spaghetty looks familiar, that’s no accident. As Karim explains:

The aesthetics, dialogue, and mannerisms of Spaghetty may feel nostalgic — they are directly inspired by Microsoft’s Clippy, one of the first, most memorable, and most famously annoying ‘productivity assistants’ of tech history. For those who persevere, the conversation with Spaghetty can take some unexpected turns — progressing from the basics of generative art (composition, color palettes, the infinite space of randomness) to more philosophical and controversial topics suddenly relevant in our race to outdo each other’s AIs and achieve artificial general intelligence (or, you know, the technological singularity).

Aside from the questions WYLSAT raises about human-AI relations — and what those might look like in the future — the work includes various elements that hark back to Karim’s earlier works. Getting to rearrange them and alter their palettes is a reminder of the infinite possibilities generative art affords the artist and how often much of the artistry of the category often comes down to the choices the artist makes and the limitations they place on themselves.

WYLSAT rewards protracted investigation, and as Karim explains, “If you don't come out of the Spaghetty experience feeling a little anxious or shocked, there's more to uncover by spending longer with the artwork!”

We want to thank Karim for his hard work bringing this project to life, and we’d like to invite you to uncover Spaghetty’s secrets for yourself:

If someone forwarded this to you, consider thanking them — and supporting our work — by subscribing and joining 7,250+ Metaversalists embracing the possibilities of decentralized ownership each week.

Headliners 🤘

  • FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is testifying this week, and early indications are if he wasn’t going to jail before he decided to take the stand, he probably is in the wake of it.

  • Leica has unveiled a new camera, the M11-P ($9,195), that stores metadata in line with the Content Authenticity Initiative, which seeks to prove image provenance to combat deep fakery and promote transparency about the use of AI.

  • Speaking of AI, Adobe hosted its annual Adobe Max event and revealed a vast selection of new AI-powered tools it’s adding to its suite of apps:

  • The Metagovernance Project released the first version of its State of Web3 Grants Report, which details where grants in the space have gone and how they’ve been used.

  • Azuki is hosting a raffle for 530 “Mind of Gus” vinyl toys tied to one of the key characters in its Beanz NFT collection that promises the “power to journey into the depths of Gus’s innermost bean”:

Connect for more 🔌

Need an invite code for Bluesky? Here you go:

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Until next time, see you in the metaverse… or staring deep into one of Spaghetti’s three eyes. 😵‍💫