In the giant casino that is the internet economy, an artist placed his chips on boxes labeled “ChatGPT” and “meme coin”, and hit the jackpot with a project called TurboToad.
Based in Melbourne Rhett humanity (real name: Rhett Dashwood) has been working in the digital art space for decades, eagerly joining the world of NFT when it exploded in 2021. Earlier this year his works were featured in Sotheby’s”Natively digitalsale (it sold for €1,270, out of an estimate of €6,000-8,000). More recently, Mankind hosted marathon sessions on Twitter where followers could send him their profile pictures and he remade them in the styles of popular NFT artists like XCOPY And Beepleusing the AI, he had trained on their styles.
Despite humanity’s turmoil, the recent downturn in the NFT market has been punitive. “The digital art space is truly dead…” Mankind said in a moving recent YouTube posting. “This year has been really dead. I really struggled to get attention for my art.
Meanwhile, two other trends were in the air. First, crypto markets have been gripped by a new round of interest in so-called “memecoins”. These are new cryptocurrencies, often based on internet trends, which attract frenzied speculation (one, Pepecoin or $PEPE, was created on April 18 soaring at a market cap of $1.8 billion on May 5 before falling).
Second, the tech hype has shifted from blockchain and metaverse to generative AI, and token markets have been flooded with often dodgy new currencies with “GPT” or “AI” themes, hoping to cash out.
Following Mankind’s projects of Beeples and AI-generated XCOPY, he was thinking about how to do another work of “digital performance art” using artificial intelligence. The idea he came up with as “kind of a joke” was to ask ChatGPT to tell him how to launch a “successful memecoin” with a budget of $69.
Humanity posted to his Twitter followers that he would follow every step the AI assistant gave him, documenting his journey as he went and letting them vote whenever there was a choice.
And it worked.
Striking GPT Gold
“Honestly, it started early on with a curious idea I had the day before and a $20 subscription to ChatGPT, reaching a market cap of $200 million a few weeks later,” Mankind told Artnet. News by e-mail. “It’s breathtaking.”
In the four days starting April 23, Mankind used ChatGPT to provide him with the steps for launching a memecoin, and then followed through: generating a coin name that would excite crypto enthusiasts (the other options offered by ChatGPT were “AstroCorgi” and “HypeHound”); drafting and posting of the white paper explaining the project; write the code that would underpin the project; and launch all 69 billion tokens on the blockchain, keeping 9 billion for itself.
Humanity used the AI art generator Midjourney to create the token’s “TurboToad” mascot. His followers dubbed the creature “Quantum Leap”.
Screenshot of @Rhett’s Twitter post asking his followers about a mascot for TurboToad.
Granted, the artist blew the original $69 budget by hundreds of dollars and relied on volunteers from his Twitter followers to check the AI-written code for errors. At one point, cash-strapped, he turned to ChatGPT to suggest ways to raise funds, arriving at the idea of funding the project by exchanging donations for $TURBO tokens to get it off the ground. .
“The initial crowdfunding only brought together 50 people, each contributing between a dollar and a few hundred, willing to take a risk on what they thought was a big return,” Mankind explained. But the attention drawn to her performance online, due to the huge interest in stories about ChatGPT’s powers, served as an amplifier. When $TURBO started circulating, the project’s story attracted attention – and that attention, in turn, attracted investors looking to trade the hype. “Now we have over 16,000 holders and many large whales (as they are called in crypto) trading hundreds of thousands back and forth.”
Speaking through tears in his YouTube account of the project, Mankind explained his theory on what made it work:
What has helped me is that I have been in this space for a while and have forged sincere relationships with people I have never met, but have built some trust. Because I’ve been grinding for so long. And because I’ve done crypto art work, and people respect that, a lot of artists were supporting me, and a lot of artists had bought into the idea of this experiment or performance artistic or whatever you wanted to call it. And they started retweeting it and telling people about it – just a few other artists saying things, just “Isn’t that a good idea? Doesn’t that inspire you or give you a sense of hope? »
Prior to Hail Mary’s burst of interest inspired by her ChatGPT performance, Mankind said he considered quitting art due to the brutal realities of the online creative economy:
I was also about to quit making art. It is so hard. I can go out as much as I want, but nobody’s interested. Now everyone is starting to bid on my artwork, and I’m also very grateful to these new collectors.
toad fashion
$TURBO is trading at a fraction of a fraction of a cent, but with billions of tokens traded and hordes of global memecoin fans looking to bet on the hot new thing, “market capitalization,” or total token value, has fluctuated wildly between $40 million and $250 million over the past few days, according to CoinMarketCap. That means Mankind’s personal holdings of $9 billion TURBO have likely hovered between $5 million and $33 million, at least on paper, because he can’t sell them immediately without affecting the price.
In the hyper-volatile memecoin market, $TURBO has already crashed once, peaking on May 6 before retracing some lost territory.
Screenshot of $TURBO price history, via CoinMarketCap.
“A lot of people get caught up in the hype and don’t do their own research,” Mankind admitted when asked about the potential pitfalls ahead. “Some don’t realize this is a creative experience, there’s no intrinsic value here, no team, no developers, no roadmap, just an expressed idea to which a community of people responded.”
While Mankind’s followers have praised him as an entertainer, there’s no doubt that $TURBO is a vehicle for flippers. On the NFT morning show podcast Mondaythe hosts traded stories about $TURBO entering and exiting over the weekend, with one saying he put in 2 ETH (about $3,700) and took out 3.2 ETH ( around $6,000).
Amid all the attention on the AI-assisted origin of $TURBO, fellow artist, Brooklyn-based Johnny Shankman, known as white lightsjob a video on May 5 showing how it was possible to create a memecoin in less than half a minute. After the video racked up nearly a million views, crypto watchers Express alarm on the wave of scams that may be heading to market.
Digital artist Beeple, the best-known artist in the NFT art scene, dedicated his daily digital art post on May 4 to the image of an erect penis the size of an imagined skyscraper. like a space shuttle about to take off, with the word “$TURBO” stamped on the launcher. Poking fun at the current memecoin frenzy, his caption joked that he was launching his own AI memecoin, Turboner or $TRBNR .
Beeple wrote “this is definitely something we should decide to play on immediately…I mean, given these circumstances, is there even time to think?!?! AHHHHH. JUST POP THE D BUTTON ‘BUY AND PRAY BABY MARY PEPE JESUSS!!!!!!!”
Replies to Beeple’s tweet were inundated with memecoin investors demanding to find out how they could buy into $TRBNR. A fake $TRBNR token also immediately arose.
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