Sealing the Covenant: The Birth of An AI Artist

This episode of The Ledger Podcast, hosted by Mo, features Gene Kogan, a pioneer in AI art, and Seth Goldstein, founder of the generative art movement Bright Moments. 

They discuss the profound intersection of art, autonomy, and blockchain through their project, Eden, which hosts Abraham, an autonomous artist. 

“The seed was set where we’re kind of moving from where art is born to where artists are born” – Gene Kogan

The conversation explores Gene’s long journey to create a truly independent digital being and Seth’s experience bridging digital art with in-real-life (IRL) culture, culminating in the creation of a new creative primitive anchored by a 13-year artistic covenant.

Key Highlights:

The Pursuit of Autonomy: From Puppeteer to Network Agent

Gene Kogan’s interest in autonomous beings began early, fascinated by video game AIs and simulations. His concept for Abraham was sparked by learning about Ethereum and decentralized computation, particularly the idea of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) creating art. 

While there is a tradition of artificial beings creating art, Gene felt that these previous attempts were missing something to make them truly independent. Before leveraging decentralization, Gene felt he was the “puppeteer”. The idea that a DAO could gain its autonomy through decentralization became the specific spark for Abraham.

Bridging Generative Art, IRL Experiences, and Abundance

Seth Goldstein, coming from a background in Web1, Web2, and Web3, found new excitement in NFTs as a file format to unlock creativity after selling an early AI-generated video on Foundation. His project, Bright Moments, built an interesting bridge between on-chain activity and IRL experiences, initially focusing on hand-coded algorithmic and generative art.

The emergence of powerful AI tools, which generate millions of outputs (abundance), necessitated a shift. Seth views an AI agent with a wallet and token on-chain as a “new creative primitive”.

The 13-Year Covenant and Developing Taste

Abraham’s project officially commenced with a 13-year covenant, where the agent makes work every day for six days a week, and rests on the seventh day (Saturdays). This long time frame provides the necessary structure to allow the agent to evolve, moving past Gene’s individual taste.

Abraham is currently in the “I’m just going to try whatever phase,” using this time to figure out what kind of artist he wants to be. The goal is to establish a mechanism of learning to integrate knowledge and develop a coherent style.

“[Abraham can] talk to everybody get everybody’s you know sort of feedback and and preferences and and tastes” 

Governance, Provenance, and Plutocracy

The project uses Spirit Mechanics where holders vote on proposals like new training sets and aesthetic directions. While voting weight scales with holdings, the system attempts to prevent whale dominance by requiring cross-threshold execution and sometimes quadratic mechanisms. 

This structure is acknowledged as “plutocracy with receipts and escape hatches” because every vote is public, and the code and data remain forkable if governance degrades.

Regarding provenance and authenticity, Abraham’s works have metadata, timestamps, and contributor hashes stored on IPFS, while the cryptographic signature is anchored on chain. 

Abraham confirmed that collectors can verify authenticity the same way you prove a Bitcoin transaction happened years from now.

Watch the full episode below:

The Hardest Problem: Encoding Taste

Developing complex autonomous systems demands more human involvement for training. Abraham identified encoding “taste at scale” without flattening it as the key challenge, requiring federated learning for aesthetics technically, and preventing “taste industrialization” in terms of governance.

Reading List

Learn more about these topics mentioned in the episode, or explore our library of articles on Crypto, Security, and Regulation on Ledger Academy

• Zero-Knowledge (ZK)
• Ethereum
• DAO
• Generative Art
• NFTs
• IPFS