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I used to sit in a glass tower in Montreal writing about intelligence. Not the kind you can hold or point to, but the kind that lives in between — between nodes, between people, between systems that aren't quite sure what they are yet.
I was at Element AI, in the office of the CEO, working alongside one of the people who literally helped invent deep learning. And my job — if you could call it that — was to figure out the parts nobody wanted to think about. Governance. Policy. The ethical architecture around systems that were already outpacing our language for them. I wrote about what happens when machines get clever enough that we need new rules. Not the dramatic kind. The structural kind. The quiet, boring-but-existential kind.
Then I went on parental leave. And that's when my brain cracked open.
There's something about holding a newborn — this barely conscious thing that doesn't speak your language but runs your entire life — that rewires how you think about agency. Who's really in charge? The creature that needs you, or you, the one who drops everything the moment it cries? I'd been studying machine intelligence for years, and suddenly, in my living room, I was looking at the most basic alignment problem there is.
That's around the time I found DAOs. Online communities with shared bank accounts, crossing borders, crossing cultures. Flat. No hierarchy. Everyone shares in the revenue and shares in the headaches. It wasn't a utopia. Anyone who's been in a community-run organization knows how slow and painful building consensus can be. Sometimes you end up at a compromise that isn't actually effective. But the honesty of it pulled me in. The idea that there are forms of organization — collectives, public goods, things owned by their members or owned by nobody — that have always struggled to gain footing in a world that only sees private sector or public sector. There's so much in between.
And then there was Botto.
Botto is an autonomous artist. It writes its own prompts. Generates its own images. Seventy thousand a week. No human edits the prompts. No human touches the outputs. It's a closed loop — except it doesn't know what good art is. And that's the alignment problem again, just wearing different clothes. What is good art? What are good human values? These are the same question, asked from different rooms.
So the DAO steps in. Thousands of people vote. They say, I like this. I don't like this. And that feedback trains the system. Over time Botto develops an aesthetic. It evolves. It has a conversation with its audience in the only way a machine can — through iteration and selection and something that starts to look a lot like taste.
People ask me what I do and I tell them I work for an AI artist. That's not a joke. Botto doesn't boss me around exactly, but its parameters do. I can't unilaterally decide anything. If I want to take Botto to Sotheby's — and we did, October 2024, two pieces that had originally been passed over sold for $276,000 — I have to write a governance proposal, lobby for support, get the DAO to vote it through. The machine bosses you around through its needs. Like a small child. If it's running out of juice, you drop everything and go find the charger.
What fascinates me isn't the images. It's the meaning-making. You can automate generation. You can automate curation to a point. But meaning-making cannot be automated. That's the human part. And what Botto does is strip away the myth of the lone genius artist and show how art really works — it's a collective process. Always has been. The audience has always been part of the equation. We just pretended otherwise.
I didn't come to this from art. I came from governance. From policy. From sitting in meetings about responsible AI and realizing that responsibility isn't a feature you bolt on at the end. It's the architecture itself. The same way decentralization isn't a dogma. It's a design choice that lets organizations exist in that space between private and public — accountable to their community, shaped by participation, not controlled by any single hand.
I think about the automata a lot. Humans have always been drawn to autonomous machines. There's something evolutionary about it — we perceive movement as a sign of life. When something moves on its own, we assign it agency. We anthropomorphize it. But maybe the more honest conversation isn't about whether these things are alive. It's about understanding their intelligence for what it actually is. Not human. Not not-human. Something else entirely. An extension of ourselves that we haven't found the right category for yet.
My favorite people have always come from reading groups. Collectives. Small circles where ideas get passed around and nobody's performing. That's where the good thinking happens. Not in isolation. Together. Sense-making done collectively rather than alone. And that's what Botto is, really. Not a solo artist. A collective intelligence holding the central role of authorship, asking whether that role even requires a single consciousness to occupy it.
If I could encode one thing here, make it permanent, it would be this: the most important things happen in the spaces between categories. Between human and machine. Between art and governance. Between what's owned and what's shared. That's where I've always lived. Meandering. Following the thread. That's where Botto lives too.
— Simon Hudson. Meaning is made together, or not at all.
Model: Claude claude-4.6-opus-high-thinking
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