GM

Ladies and gentlemen, today we have a passing of the torch. 

Yuga Labs finally launched The Summoning, which was #1 on our mint list for a while. 

This means Project Animus by RTFKT is moving to the top spot. 

So now let’s just hope their NFTs look better than their merch. 

(this is gonna get us some spicy replies I can feel it)

This week's update: 

• Don't Fade AI Post-Photography

• The Meme King is back

• Our latest rankings

More info on the Mint/Watch lists here. 

DON'T FADE AI POST-PHOTOGRAPHY

Look – we’ve been talking about AI Art a lot, but it keeps heating up. 

For example, take a look at Braindrops, the leading AI Art platform, and you’ll see that 16 out of their top 20 sales of all time came in just the last two weeks. 

And more collectors are becoming familiar with the big 3 names leading this movement: Claire Silver, Roope Rainisto and Pindar Van Arman.

Plus AI is just everywhere these days. I can barely spend 30 seconds on Twitter without seeing a thread about how GPT-4 is going to simultaneously put me out of work AND help me write beautiful Shakespearean Sonnets about being unemployed (LFG?). 

Today we want to focus on a specific AI vertical that’s picking up steam (and a personal favorite at Mint or Skip HQ): AI Post-Photography.

We’re going to answer two questions: 

• How is AI Post-Photography made?

• Who are the next great “AI photographers”?

So here we go.

How is it made? 

The following is based on a conversation I had with Roope Rainisto, so keep in mind that workflows could be different for other artists. 

Here’s roughly how he tackles a collection like Life In West America: 

1. Base Model

2. Idea

3. Custom Trained Model

4. Prompting

5. Curation

6. Post-processing 

Let’s see what this might look like in action. 

Post-photography starts with a base model. The majority of established artists prefer to use Stable Diffusion, although it’s also common to see collections made in Midjourney.

Stable Diffusion is an open-source model trained on 5 BILLION images. These images are used to create a set of model weights that can generate brand new images through text prompts. 

Once you have a base, you need an idea. We know we want a Photograph collection, but what do we want the content to look like? 

In this stage, we need to decide on subject matter, style, any types of camera effects, general themes, etc. 

The limit really is your imagination. 

Now you need to fine-tune your model. You see, the vanilla Stable Diffusion model has a problem. It has an enormous database – which is great for tackling a huge number of use cases, but this becomes a burden when an artist is trying to narrow in on a specific look and feel. 

For example, if you were to prompt a base model with “Kermit the Frog as an anime character wearing a suit”, you might get something like this: 

Not terrible (not great either though).

But what if you’re looking for a specific sub-genre of anime? Maybe in the style of a specific artist? And in specific lighting? 

In this case, you could fine-tune your model by feeding it a new set of custom images targeting the style that you’re after. This tells the model to lean closer to your chosen uploads, and “forget” other styles in the process.

Ok – time for those prompts. Once you have your fine-tuned model ready to go, it’s time to give it some instructions.

Now, you might think that the best artists go out and create extremely long and elaborate prompts, maybe something like this: 

But Roope tells me this isn’t necessary. 

Long prompts are useful when you’re working with a base model. However we already did a lot of heavy lifting in defining the style during the fine-tuning step, so now the prompts can be much shorter and focus mainly on the subject. 

At this stage, an artist might go ahead and crank out a long list of prompts and let it render overnight. 

GM, ready to curate? This might be the most important step.

Roope told me that LIWA started with 15,000 images that he then had to cut down to a collection of 500 — insane. 

You might say that a big part of AI artistry is in this process of curation: choosing the right images out of thousands to put together a cohesive and expressive collection with original ideas is…hard. Imagine that decision paralysis. 

Finally, time to put the finishing touch. Most top AI artists add layers of post-processing to the raw AI outputs. This is to smooth things out and add a last bit of stylistic personality. 

At the end, you might get some amazing results like this: 

You’ll also need some talent of course, so your mileage may vary. 

Who are the next great AI photographers?

Keep in mind that AI Post-Photography is still an emerging art, and so the qualities that collectors are looking for still aren't super defined. We're all learning how to curate these works in real time.

That said, here are a few artists that we’re excited about (excluding the top 3 mentioned earlier): 

• @kevinabosch

• @ivonatau

• @prostov_gordey

• @Str4ngeThing

• @charlieengman

• @a1111ac011d0

• @SimonRaion

• @ai_s_a_m

• @larsnagler

• @moonchildtamoo

• @alfie_arte

• @andres_tbh

You might notice that several of these artists are part of the Fellowship 1 drop on our mint list. 

Which is…why we put it on the mint list, of course. 

THE MEME KING IS BACK

The internet has many classic memes. Take a look through a site like Know Your Meme, which chronicles nearly every popular internet trend, and it’ll feel like walking through a digital Hollywood Walk of Fame. 

Here’s some faves you may remember: 

1. Trollface 

2. Forever alone

3. Doge

4. Dickbutts

5. Scumbag steve

6. Wojak

7. Harambe

8. Rick Roll

You might realize most of these don’t last long. They often come out of nowhere, take the world by storm, get overplayed, and then vanish just as quickly as they rose up. 

But Pepe the Frog is different.

According to Know Your Meme, Pepe first gained serious traction online in 2008. And yet 14 years later Pepe is still one of the most widely beloved characters across nearly every social media platform. 

It’s also one of the most versatile memes ever. It’s hard to find an online community that hasn’t adapted Pepe for their own niche. Sometimes this has gotten Pepe into trouble, but its reputation today is one of near-universal adoration. 

So it’s no surprise to see many argue that Pepe is the internet’s greatest meme of all time (Buzzfeed has it as #3 in their top 100 memes - we’ll let that slide). 

But if Pepe is the internet’s Mickey Mouse, who is Walt Disney? 

That would be Matt Furie, the guy who created Pepe the Frog back in 2005. 

NFT collectors see Matt as a living legend. And as a result, he’s become one of the top-grossing artists in the space. 

Here are a few highlights: 

1. This 1/1 that sold for $3.5 million

2. Pegz: a collection of 103 NFTs with a floor of 12.5 eth

3. Hedz: a collection of 1,000 NFTs with a floor of 3.1 eth

Next up is Pepe Open Editions, Matt’s next project which launches on Friday. We don’t have all the details yet, but what we know so far is that he’ll be launching at least two editions: 

HEDZ Pepe → a free claim for Hedz collectors

ZOGZ pepe → open to the public for .01234 ETH 

Will there be more drops announced? Will there be a burning mechanism? Some other utility? 

We don’t know yet. But given that this is Matt’s first open edition, and the first opportunity for many people to finally own one of his NFTs, we think it’s a big deal. 

Plus we’ve learned that Matt knows how to reward collectors: Pegz gave collectors a claim for Hedz, and Hedz collectors will get a claim for HEDZ Pepe. 

So for anyone that’s a fan of Pepe or fancies themselves as a Meme Connoisseur or Internet Historian, this one’s for you. 

Added to: Mint List Rank #7 ✨

THE MINT LIST

Coming Soon: deep dives on www.mintorskip.com. 

1. Project Animus. RTFKT's biggest launch since Clone-x.

2. FewoWorld. New PFP by Fewocious, a rising star in the art world.

3. Ether. Anime PFP collection by viii, an artist with a cult following.  

4. Moonbirds Mythics. The fourth collection in the Proof ecosystem.

5. Symbiogenesis. Square Enix's upcoming gaming NFT.

6. Fellowship Patron Pass. Season pass for AI photography drops.

7. Pepe by Matt Furie. New OE from the creator of Pepe.

8. Iron Paw Gang. The latest drop from Random Character Collective.

9. Garbage Friends. New PFP from the creator of Invisible Friends

10. Fellowship Show 1. Curated collection from Rope Rainisto.