NFTA machine learning enthusiast Yannic Kilcher has built an AI that can generate more Bored Ape NFT!

The Bored Apes Yacht Club is almost the face of NFT 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 in the end, you have a generator that can create very convincing fakes.

Kilcher first scrapped the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection of 10,000 images. He then trained Nvidia’s StyleGAN2 neural network on the dataset. The finished system produces Bored Apes that are unique and fungible. Kilcher admits, however, that the images aren’t always perfect. “The quality of my system is not very good, there are often visible artifacts,” he told TNW (The Next Web). He adds that Cyril Zakka and Nathan Cooper Jones have built similar tools that produce better outputs. Yet Kilcher has also created something truly original: an application that generates apes based on images that you upload. The app harnesses OpenAI’s CLIP, the same model that powers the DALL-E 2 image generator. You can try it out for yourself, but you’ll need a local GPU to run the system. 

And that's 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 his AI 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 hitting the download button for a funny jab at the whole nonfungibility of NFTs.