“1099-DA” is an AI generated, interactive piece of art. It employs AI, game mechanics, humor, and NFTs to satirize the regulatory landscape of blockchain in the US. The project allows collectors to experience the overwhelming requirement of the newly proposed 1099-DA form. A low estimate of 8-9 Billion of these forms will be submitted to the IRS if the rules go into effect.
“1099-DA” is composed of 1099 NFTs, which showcase caricature-like portraits of SEC Chair Gary Gensler, Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen, and IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel on different types of currency. The images were created using a series of custom trained Stable Diffusion models (more on the exact process below).
“1099-DA” utilizes custom smart contracts to engage collectors with a parody of the proposed 1099-DA form. NFT owners can call the 'exchangeCurrency' function, altering their NFT’s metadata. Each NFT can be changed to show a different political appointee; Gensler, Yellen, or Werfel. Changing an NFT will create a satirical, AI-generated 1099-DA form. Collectors then have the opportunity to mint the 1099 as an NFT by calling the ‘submit1099ToIRS’ function. This not only adds another unique AI-generated NFT to their collection but allows them to experience the ridiculousness of generating and submitting these forms for simply ‘exchanging’ their NFT. The prompts and data used to create these fake documents are pulled from the meta-data of the NFTs in the project. This real-world use case of tracking input and output data for AI with NFTs is overlooked by current regulators.
If the “1099-DA” collection ever hits a critical majority, where two-thirds of NFTs are changed to the same appointee, every NFT in the series will permanently lock to showcase that appointee. This mechanism is analogous to congress clarifying the regulatory landscape with a two-thirds vote. This is a twist for collectors as their NFTs may unpredictably shift from rare to common or vice-versa.
Below outlines the process used for creating the images of the NFTs. Each image is purely AI-generated, there was no post-processing (e.g. Photoshop) of any output images:
- Several V2.1-768px Stable Diffusion models were trained to generate distinct and iconic types of US currency from 1870s Gold Certificates to present day Federal Reserve Notes.
- Thousands of currency images were generated and curated down to 12 based on their style and aesthetic. Particular attention was paid to curating images with similar framing and drop shadows (these were not added or changed in post processing software).
- Next several new Stable Diffusion models were trained to generate caricatures in the likeness of SEC Chair Gary Gensler, Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen, and IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel.
- Using Stable Diffusion’s Automatic1111 interface, humorous images of the appointees were inpainted onto the 12 currency types. 10,000+ images were generated and curated into a final set of 1099 for each appointee.
- Finally, for the rarest currency type, the Gold Certificate, the artist used a special process with inpainting in Automatic1111 to add the words “Gold God.” This element was added purely in Stable Diffusion. No post-processing software (e.g. photoshop) was used on the output images.