Collections
The Early AI Art Collections represent the most cohesive and ambitious projects of the sector.
Unlike isolated one off works, these collections were launched as dedicated smart contracts.
The artist’s idea is expressed not as a single image, but as an interconnected series that forms a cohesive narrative.
This format allows the artist to push ideas further iterating, experimenting, and revealing multiple perspectives on a single concept.
Lost Robbies
Robbie Barrat’s seminal GAN portrait series from 2018. Distributed via Gift Cards for free at Christies Art and Tech Summit most remain lost to this day.
View on SuperRare
Alternate Universes
Four Early AI editions: In Search of Satori, Guardians of the Galaxy, Buddha Dreams in Color, and The Doorway.
View on OpenSea
Realiti
Created by Atay Ilgun in May 2019, 186 dreamlike portraits inspired by Grimes song Realiti. Featured by Sotheby’s for its role in Early AI Art history.
View on OpenSea
Bloemenveiling
Anna Ridler’s Bloemenveiling is a conceptual piece where metadata loss becomes part of the artwork’s meditation on memory and impermanence.
View on OpenSea
Digital Art Collective
Created by the artist “Bitcoin” in June 2019, this 214-work series spans multiple AI tools and styles. It is an eclectic record of experimentation in the medium’s formative years.
View on OpenSea
AI Crypto Art
Minted in August 2019, this 70 work series explores the emerging GAN aesthetic at the intersection of AI and dark cultural events.
View on OpenSea
GANdinsky 3D
A micro series of just three works, minted September 2019. GAN generated abstractions inspired by Kandinsky, reimagined in three dimensions.
View on OpenSea
DeepBlack
Trained on a corpus of classical masterpieces, it reinterprets centuries of art history through neural vision. The collections was minted in tranches from 2019 to 2021.
View on OpenSea
EtherIslands
Minted October 2019 by “Bitcoin,” this 54 work set used Nvidia GauGAN to conjure island paradises. Scarce and highly coveted among Early AI collectors.
View on OpenSea
The Yetepey Series
A prolific series capturing the artist’s evolving dialogue with neural networks across two formative years. The series contains both still and animated artworks.
View on OpenSea
Abstract Art Collection
Minted November 2019 by “Bitcoin,” this 80 work series explores AI abstraction at a time when the tools were still unpredictable, producing compositions that balance chaos and control.
View on OpenSea
GANergy
Minted November 2019, GANergy stands out for its vibrant palette and kinetic abstractions. Opensea bids cannot be accepted on this contract so most trading is done OTC.
View on OpenSea
GeneA.I.dols
Collection of AI Generated faces. Unfortunately most have no image due to lost meta data. 559 works (101 have Art, 458 have lost metadata).
View on OpenSea
Zori.ai
Zori is an early Anime GAN portrait series by Ivan Jacobs, a medical doctor who has studied AI since 2008. A custom model generates original anime faces intended as characters for an RPG world.
View on OpenSea
Crypto Portraits
Crypto Portraits is a collection by digital artist Hans Benzin (known as ProofOfArtwork). Minted throughout 2019 and 2020 the collections features AI Generated portraits.
View on OpenSea
AI Human Art
Minted January 2020 by “Bitcoin,” this 69 work series has a distinctive, slightly abstract look which is a result of the era’s nascent AI techniques
View on OpenSea
Shortcuts
Shortcuts is a collection of 48 AI generated artworks minted in early 2020 by the crypto artist called Shortcut. Each piece is an experiment in GAN driven creativity, highlighting how subtle tweaks in latent variables can produce a wide range of visual outcomes.
View on OpenSea
CryptoWeirdos
CryptoWeirdos is a collection of 200 AI generated characters minted in February 2020. It was created by the prolific 2018 SuperRare Artists known as Albert.
View on OpenSea
CryptoAI
Created in March 2020 by a holder of CryptoWierdos, this collection follows a similar style to CryptoWeirdos. 45 Works created using the same AI tool.
View on OpenSea
Generative
Generative is an umbrella collection of 104 NFT artworks minted in March 2020. The collection utilises the same base image but with different AI imaginations of it.
View on OpenSea
Bastard GAN Punks
Bastard GAN Punks (V1) is a collection of AI generated punk characters created by Berk Özdemir in April 2020. Consisting of 76 “bastardized” CryptoPunks, this series was produced by training a GAN on Larva Labs’ original 10,000 CryptoPunks dataset.
View on OpenSea
AI Abstract
AI Abstract is a limited collection of 28 AI generated abstract artworks from mid 2020 that emphasises vibrant colour and texture.
View on OpenSea
BlackBox Dolls
BlackBox Dolls is a boutique NFT series of 14 works minted in July 2020, exploring the intersection of AI and fashion.
View on OpenSea
GANdoodle Specimens
GANdoodle Specimens is a collection of 15 GAN generated doodle artworks by digital illustrator Stina Jones, released in July 2020. GANdoodle Specimens stands out for its character and charm.
View on OpenSea
BugGAN
BugGan is a micro collection of 8 AI generated artworks from September 2020 that focuses on insect like forms and bug inspired creations. The art works blend and morph features of insects into imaginative new creatures, yielding surreal hybrids.
View on OpenSea
Legacy 0xmons
The precursor to the 0xmons universe, Legacy 0xmons introduced an imaginative ecosystem of on-chain, AI generated monsters inspired by Pokémon. This early set established the aesthetic and technical blueprint later expanded in the main 0xmons release in December 2020. Fully encoded on Ethereum, each image is intended to persist for as long as the blockchain does.
View on OpenSea
0xmons
Minted in December 2020, 0xmons is an imaginative ecosystem of on chain AI generated monsters inspired by Pokemon. They are fully encoded on Ethereum, ensuring the images remain intact for as long as the blockchain exists.
View on OpenSea
NFT Tracks
Minted December 2020 by “Bitcoin,” NFTTracks comprises of 19 AI Generated Audio Files. The songs created span a number of Genres, and it is regarded as the First AI Music Collection.
View on OpenSea
The Fountain Art
Created by artist Bård Ionson as an homage to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, the series used a StyleGAN2 model trained on images of toilets to produce its final artworks.
View on OpenSea
Retroactive Mints
Retroactive mints occupy a unique niche in the AI Art timeline. They are outputs generated in the early years of the medium (2015–2020) but only minted to the blockchain recently. They are often retroactively minted due to their cultural significance, as in the case of AlignDraw (created in 2015, minted in November 2023), which was the first text to image art generator.
alignDRAW
Created in 2015 by Elman Mansimov, alignDRAW is the first text to image model, a proof of concept that foreshadowed today’s AI image tools. Revived with by Fellowship in 2023, the project has since entered the Worcester Art Museum collection and been exhibited at Art Basel.
View on OpenSea
DeepDreams
DeepDreams features seven original images from Alexander Mordvintsev, creator of DeepDream. Publicly released in 2015, Google’s DeepDream helped introduce neural image synthesis to a global audience and set a visual language that shaped Early AI art.
View on OpenSea
A Book from the Sky
Created in 2015 by Gene Kogan, A Book from the Sky is an early experiment in generative AI trained on nearly a million handwritten Chinese characters. The model learns underlying strokes, forms, and textures, then synthesizes new glyphs that never existed in the source data.
View on OpenSea
Evolved Hallucinations
Conceived in 2017 Trevor Paglen’s Evolved Hallucinations asks what computer vision might look like if it were trained on allegory, symbolism, and metaphor rather than simple labels. Paglen builds models with image vocabularies drawn from literature, philosophy, poetry, folklore, and spiritual traditions. The result is a body of images that embraces ambiguity and tests the limits of perception in machine vision.
View on OpenSea
Honourable Mentions
From 2021 onwards, the number of AI generated art NFT collections grew significantly. The tools became more accessible both to create AI Art and to create NFTs. This makes documenting every single release from 2021 onwards, an impossible task.
With that being said, there are a number of notable collections and platforms that have significantly helped shape and grow the AI art space.
Trash Royale
Minted February 2021 by “Bitcoin,” these 20 works are AI Trash Art.
View on OpenSea
Bastard GAN Punks v2
The project was a sequel to the smaller v1 release, improving resolution and output variety while keeping its irreverent, chaotic spirit.
View on OpenSea
Maxon Bollocks
Maxon Bollocks is a narrative driven AI art experiment launched in September 2021, with 3,888 NFTs generated by a custom GAN. What makes Maxon Bollocks stand out is the level of effort that has gone into the creation of this project.
View on OpenSea
Lost Poets
Lost Poets is a large scale AI portrait series by Pak. Each “Poet” is created by a purpose built model developed for the project. Every Poet descends from one of the 1,024 Origin NFTs, shaped by 256 latent genes that determine form and identity.
View on OpenSea
Botto
Botto, launched in October 2021, is an autonomous AI artist governed by a decentralised community. Using a hybrid of large scale generative models and human curation, Botto produces hundreds of fragments weekly, from which token holders vote to select a single piece to mint.
Explore BottoMachine Hallucinations NYC
Created by Refik Anadol in October 2021, Machine Hallucinations: NYC is a 1,000 piece NFT series generated from millions of publicly available New York City photographs. These were processed using GANs and custom ML pipelines to produce cinematic, abstract AI paintings.
View on OpenSea
Synthetic Dreams
Released in November 2021, Synthetic Dreams is another landmark collection from Refik Anadol. Anadol framed the work as an exploration of perception, collective memory, and the evolving boundaries between human and machine imagination.
View on OpenSea
Yamashita GAN
A generative series derived from the photographs of Michael Yamashita, the National Geographic visual storyteller whose four decade career spans China, Japan, and the Silk Road. A custom GAN interprets his archive to synthesize new images that echo the journeys, textures, and light of his reportage, transforming documentary memory into latent visions. This collection reflects his move into NFTs, translating his celebrated photography archive into a new medium.
View on OpenSea
CyborgDAO
Membership is granted through holding one of 968 genesis passes. The DAO’s mission is to collect culturally significant AI art, and it holds a number of Early AI Art works.
Explore CyborgDAO
BrainDrops
BrainDrops is a curated NFT platform dedicated entirely to AI art. It quickly became a leading venue for AI Artists, with early releases from Pindar Van Arman, Claire Silver, and Roope Rainisto.
Explore BrainDrops
Anne Spalter AI Spaceships
AI Spaceships is a 2022 series by Anne Spalter. Her digital and AI generated works have been shown at the Centre Pompidou, the RISD Museum, and the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, and have appeared with Sotheby’s and Phillips as well as in The New York Times.
View on OpenSea
Fellowship
Fellowship is a contemporary art gallery and curatorial platform founded in London. Fellowship’s programming includes high level exhibition drops, artist residencies, and curated narratives that map the evolving cultural dialogue of AI art.
Explore Fellowship