NOTE: if you would only like to change your Epohero’s image, you can skip this process

1. https://art-ai.com/hero/update
2. Connect your wallet
3. Select your token
4. Type in the new name you would like in the “new name” field.
5. Once you are finished, click “Update your Epohero’s name” where you will be asked sign the signature request via metamask.

Confirm MM notification, this will cost gas ONLY.

How to reroll your Epohero’s Image

NOTE: This step is also optional, you do not have to change your Epohero’s image if you only wish to change it’s name.

1. https://art-ai.com/hero/update
2. Connect your wallet
3. Select your token
4. Scroll down to “Update the look of your EpoHero” or click the blue button that says “update your Epohero image”
5. Type your instructions for the AI in the “type any words or phrases to describe your hero” text field. You may use any combination of words separating them with “ , “ or “ | “.
6. Continue this process until you are completely satisfied with your new Epohero.
7. Once you are finished, click “Update your Epohero” where you will be to asked sign the signature request via metamask. This step is completely free. Changing the image does not cost gas.

Reverting back to your original image

NOTE: This step is only relevant if changes have been made to an Epohero image and you would like to revert back to the ORIGINAL Epohero image.

1. https://art-ai.com/hero/update
2. Connect your wallet
3. Select your token
4. Click “Reset your Epohero Image”
5. You will be asked sign the signature request via metamask. This step is completely free. Resetting the image does not cost gas.

Premint: 31st January 2022

Public Mint:1st February 2022

Mint Price: 0.08 ETH

1 Eponym = 1 Pre-mint Spot

EpoHeros are dynamic, user-generated virtual identities, that are game ready for metaverse games.

Users will generate their own EpoHero using our text-to-hero generator. After minting a EpoHero, owners could animate their new virtual identities using either text, or voice — making the EpoHeroes speak their messages.

We are also working on a method to create 3D models based on the EpoHeroes that will be airdropped to minters who keep their EpoHero, and a method to create derivative EpoHeros, that will be open to all owners.

Some time after the mint we’ll launch the option to change the look of an EpoHero. In the future this might cost $EPO, our coming token, but we expect to launch it for free in the beginning.

Introduction

Earlier this week we announced the launch of our new project: EpoHereos. We started working on the EpoHero mint shortly after the EpoStory burn event, building on many of the building blocks that we have developed throughout the past 2.5 years.

One of the recurring requests from the community following the Eponym mint was for us to launch an AI pfp generator, that our community members could use as their virtual identities. This has appeared in our roadmap for January, and we are happy to launch our new project with pre-mint starting 31st of January.

Not just a pfp generator

We believe that there’s a lot of value in combining AI and NFTs. Eponym was an example of how our AI can drive the decentralization of art, and turn every creative individual into an artist.

With this project, we wanted to stretch the limits of pfp projects, by using AI to extend virtual identities and give them new power & utility. The key goal we had in mind was to create a pfp project that will be useful in many different contexts.

Make your own portrait

The first innovation of EpoHeroes, is that users create their own portraits using our GAN technology. These can be photorealistic, or fantasy styled. You can look like Taylor Swift, or as a hungry zombie. Nothing is off limits. The generator is built to be inclusive and work for different genders and ethnic origins.

The interface of portrait creation is similar to Eponym — the user types a text prompt (“Dumbledore looking confused”) and the AI spits back an image. We opted for text because we believe text is the most flexible form of user input.

For the first time in NFTs — you get to choose what your virtual identity looks like with complete creative freedom.

Customize Your EpoHero

We are gamers. We grow up playing Diablo & Elder scrolls and adventuring in D&D. When working on the EpoHero project we were inspired by all the RPGs we played. This is why after generating your EpoHero looks, you will get to make some choices that will turn your EpoHero into a game-ready character.

• Name your EpoHero. The name will become the NFT title. Every name is unique and not be used by anyone else after you mint it. Think about it as your game handle.
• Choose a class for your EpoHero. You get to choose one of 7 classes: Sorcerer, Warrior, Necromancer, Monk, Assassin, Druid & Artificer (special class only available for Eponym holders).
• Choose your alignment: Good, Neutral, or Evil & Lawful, Neutral or Chaotic.

The choices you make will affect the random allocation of special attributes. Your choices will become a part of the Ethereum blockchain, so choose carefully. Once you mint your EpoHero your choices can’t be changed.

Your portraits can speak

EpoHeroes are not meant to be silent! Immediately after minting your EpoHero, you will have access to a page on the EpoHero website that allows you to make your portrait speak.

You could record your own voice, or use one of our AI voices using text-to-speech. Either way, your portrait will come alive and speak your words. There is no limit to how many times you can reanimate your portraits, and animation is completely free. You can now express yourself using your virtual identity. Make your NFT sing, record your thought for Twitter or send a speaking birthday card. It’s up to you. The resulting videos are downloadable as MP4 files.

They can also change shape

After minting your pfp, it’s not game over. Some time after the minting is over, we’ll add to option to change your pfp (in the future this might cost $EPO). Missed the mint? Just pick up an EpoHero in a marketplace and make it yours.

This serves two functions:

1. Sometimes you feel like looking different. You could use your NFT to express your mood or take on a holiday theme. Zombify your EpoHero for Halloween.
2. AI develops at a mind-blowing pace— and your NFTs will develop together with it! We are constantly working on improving our technology, and adapting academic progress to use in the metaverse. Instead of having to buy a new NFT with each new technological development, you could just swap your portrait for one from a newer model.

Changing the looks of your EpoHero has no impact on its other attributes (class, alignment, etc.).

Roam the Metaverse

One of the developments we are currently working is an algorithm that turns portrait pictures into 3D avatars. The generator will be compatible with this technology, meaning you could get a 3D avatar of your portrait, that will work with different Metaverse formats, to use within games such as The Sandbox, and even in VR & AR. We are hoping to do a free airdrop to minters who kept their EpoHeroes in a couple of months, depending on the progress we make with the algorithms.

The Future

We are constantly exploring how AI can enhance our experience in the metaverse. Be it computer vision or reinforcement learning. As technologies mature we will release more AI services that will enhance the utility of EpoHeroes. Some things we have in mind:

• Use PFPs for video calls
• Create a Twitter account for your PFP that will use your writing style
• Merge your avatar with other NFTs your own — got an RTFKT sneaker and a Dolce e Gabbana Tiara? they were not built for your avatar but AI can make them compatible.
• Utilize the AI services for your other NFTs.

All of this will tie will be tied together with the $EPO token. More on this soon. Stick around, it’s going to be a wild ride.

References

We used many open source technologies and academic works in building Eponym & EpoHeroes and were inspired by many more. We would really appreciate all the researchers & engineers who make modern AI possible by contributing their work. In particular:

• Karras el al Training Generative Adversarial Networks with Limited Data
• Kerras el al. Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN
• Zhou et al. MakeItTalk: Speaker-Aware Talking-Head Animation. SIGGRAPH Asia 2020
• Siarohin et al. Motion Representations for Articulated Animation. Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2019
• Wang et al. Real-ESRGAN: Training Real-World Blind Super-Resolution with Pure Synthetic Data. International Conference on Computer Vision Workshops (ICCVW). 2021
• Artflow Plaform. Portraits generated by AI.
• GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models.
• Radform et al. Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision. 2021
• Rosinality on github. Implementation of Stylegan2, denoising diffusions,

The Details

Generation 2 Is Born

• Eponym generation 2 is launching on 6, November 2021.
• The only way to participate in generation 2 is to swap 2 Eponyms from generation 1 for a “generator token”. The “generator token”, will be used to mint generation 2. Generator tokens are NON-TRANSFERABLE, the wallet burning has to do the minting.
• The price for minting a generation 2 Eponym will be set at 0.05ETH. This is to pay for server costs and to ensure maximum availability.
• You will have one week to burn generation 1 Eponyms AND mint generation 2 Eponyms. We call this time period the burning event.
• Since generation 2 will be substantially smaller, and since we are developing a dedicated website to browse Eponyms — generation 2 will have none of the 1st generation properties on OpenSea.
• Generation 2 Eponyms cannot have the same name as a generation 1 Eponym. However, you can reuse names of Eponyms that you burn.
• Generation 2 will be trimmed of hidden characters, i.e spaces in text, before minting. This also means if you burn a hidden character generation 1 — you cannot reuse the name.
• In Generation 2 you will have the ability to give the AI an additional set of instructions. This is meant to be used to request color schemes, styles, emotions, etc. The instructions will not be a part of the title, or appear on the token at all. There will be a separate line where the user can input the instructions for the modifier.
• Generation 2 has an upgraded AI that has better fidelity. Especially on portraits & landscapes.

Generation Two Transforms

• On the 13th of November 2021, Generation 2 Eponyms will transform into EpoStories.
• Holders of EpoStories will have the option to modify an EpoStory: changing the text & image of the EpoStory by using the generator. This doesn’t create a new token, but changes the token “in place” — keeping supply constant. The most recently generated eponym will be the one that is visible on OpenSea.
• The old text & image will remain a part of the history of the token, will be visible and searchable on a new website we are developing for the purpose of enriching the Eponym experience. Each text & image pair is called a “Layer”.
• Holders will have one week to modify their EpoStories. This is called an Epovent.
• A modification event will take place on the third week of every month.
• In order to modify an EpoStory, the owner MUST own either a generation 1 Eponym OR a “pen.” Pens are a new token type that does not yet exist. When they do exist they will be scarce.
• A “modification” will cost 0.08ETH.
• In the future, Generation 2 holders will be able to claim a clip of their Stories.
• Generation 2 holders will gain commercial rights to ALL layers of their EpoStory, whether they were created by them or came with their purchased generation 2 eponym. For example, if you purchase a generation 2 eponym that comes with a previous history that someone else created, you own ALL the rights to that generation 2 eponym.

An example of an Eponym Story. Each line is paired with an image.

After Generation 2

With modifications and the new portal in place, we believe generation 2 of Eponyms will become the ultimate curated experience and collection.

The new portal will allow people to interact with Eponyms on a deeper level — finding their favorite authors/artists, building on top of their work, and collaborating with them on creating constantly changing pieces of art.

Upcoming priorities will be:

1. Promoting Eponym gen1+gen2 via events, auctions, collaborations and more.
2. Welcoming new members to our community via another public mint, using a different AI and a different interface. Currently looking at mid-December, but this is subject to change. Collectors who own a gen1 and gen2 will get private access . This will not be a generation 3, but a separate lineage.

The Rationale & Framework

Our vision outlined a collection of art that is constantly evolving, and valued, via community driven creation, curation & collection. We believe that mechanisms introduced for generation 2 will allow us to achieve this vision — a collection that will keep its relevance in the longer term.

The interplay between the two generations will create fascinating artistic choices for each and every Eponym collector — and we can’t wait to see how this evolves. The art knows no bounds and is only restricted by the community’s imagination and artistic vision.

Generation 1 is our genesis collection — it is not only the first time an NFT collection was created by a massively collaborative and interactive interface, it is also a beautiful snapshot of the NFT community at the time of its creation — an unplanned launch during NFL Sunday. Eponyms were born in chaos and created with passion. We believe that every single piece in generation 1 holds historical value, and every participant of generation 1 is an integral part of the core of Eponym.

1st generation Eponyms will be the keys to the Eponym ecosystem.

Holders of generation 1 will get:

• a vote on proposals relating to the future of Eponym
• The ability to modify Generation 2s without a need for an extra token
• Early access to our next mint, if they also hold a Generation 2
• Priority in access to auctions & gallery events organised by the teams
• Early access to new technologies (robot that will paint your Eponym?!)

In the longer term — the Eponym team is committed to creating more ways to enhance and facilitate human creativity with the help of AI. We will introduce new tools & technologies that make it easier for people to express themselves, and to create beautiful things — alone & in collaboration with others. As the eponym ecosystem grows, the role of Generation 1 and 2 will grow as well. They will stay the only two classical Eponym collections, and their owners will keep enjoying preferential access to every new project we work on. Time to make the world a more beautiful place, together.

TLDR

Ownership of an Eponyms comes with full exclusive commercial rights. Use it however you wish, for as long as you hold the Eponym. If you sell (or burn) the Eponym, you lose the commercial rights. Burned Eponyms will belong to the community (more details on this coming soon).

• Claim your high-resolution file here
• Print your Eponym here (make sure to use the high resolution file).

Your Eponym is Yours

Today we are introducing the options for collectors to claim high resolution files of their Eponyms. During our time in the generative art space, we have been approached to generate high-res art for a wild variety of use cases, including:

1. Wall prints
2. Music Album covers
3. Book covers
4. Screen savers
5. VR galleries
6. Samsung TVs
7. Bedsheets & other fabrics.

The introduction of high resolution files opens up all of these options and more for Eponym holders — they are yours to use in any way you see fit. There is only one caveat — if you sell your Eponym, you also sell the commercial rights associated with it, so if you decide to use “Creeping Death” as the cover for your new death metal album — make sure you hold it.

If you burn your Eponym — the rights will transfer to the “graveyard” account (and we might make these public domain), so similarly — don’t burn your Eponym if you use it commercially.

Printing Your Eponym

Many of you expressed interest in getting wall prints of your Eponyms. Once you claim the high-resolution version of your Eponym you can easily order a print from any printer. Hell, you can easily set up your own print on demand shop with Prodigi/Printful/Gooten/Gelato and the likes. But we want to make your life easy.

So — we are working with Prodigi, a global high quality print provider to set up a page for you to order prints with wholesale pricing (that’s 25% discount on retail price). You’d pay the printer directly and they will ship the print product directly to you. No man in the middle, no extra fee.

If you choose to use Prodigi to get your prints make sure you use the Eponym portal with the wholesale pricing:

https://eponym.prodigi.com

In the future, we might sell some art collectables ourselves and distribute the profits back to the Eponym holders, but in the meantime it’s on you.

• Properties are being added to Eponyms
• These are based on the style, subject & color of the art piece
• An extra property, the “Algo Artist”, will tell you which underlying component of the AI generated the Eponym, out of possible 15
• The purpose of the properties is to help you find art you love

Properties Are Here

Whether or not we should introduce properties for Eponyms has been a contentious issue in our growing community.

Those who favour it want to know more about their generated art, and want to have easier ways to filter the collection, while those who oppose it think that properties will get people to think about the value of Eponyms in terms of rarity attributes, instead of thinking about them as 1/1 art pieces.

We absolutely agree that Eponyms should be valued based on this cultural relevence and artistic merit, and not based on the rarity of their properties. But with our roots in art e-commerce, we are also mindful that very large collections of art (10k pieces!), are hard to navigate without effective filters. So we decided to take the middle ground — introducing properties pertaining to the objective properties of the art.

We believe that this will help people find art they love — which is what we are all here for. Whether you are looking for the missing piece for your collection — or looking for bundling opportunities, properties are here to help.

How It Works

To calculate the properties we re-purposed some of our the code we used to calculate tags in ART AI gallery. The building block is the same one used in Eponym’s text to art generator — the “text matcher”.

We decided to go for 3 classes of properties: style, subject & dominant color. For each of them, we trained the AI to identify specific values. This leaves us with the following properties:

Style: Abstract, Classical, Expressionism, Impressionism, Portraiture, Surrealism

Subject: Abstract, Architecture, Landscape, Portraits, Seascape

Dominant Color: Black, Blue, Green, Grey, Orange, Pink, Purple, Red, White, Yellow

For each image in the collection, we asked the text-image matcher whether the image matches one of the texts in the form of “an Abstract painting”, “A painting of Landscape“, “A Blue Painting”, etc. for each of the possible values.

When the algorithm identifies a match, an attribute is added. This means that some artworks only have some of the properties. Since all of the attributes have been determined by the AI, with no human intervention and no manual tagging — it is not perfect. It is meant as a tool that will help you explore the collection with ease.

The Algo-Artist

We wanted to give you some insight on how these works of art are generated, so we added another property — the Algo-Artist. Our art generator was specialized on generating art in 15 different domains. These were determined by clustering the training data into 15 groups of “similar” artworks (similarity here being a pretty vague concept).

When a text input is given, the resulting image will come from one of those 15 specialities. The choice of speciality depends on the text input, and the random seed.

We call it the “Algo-Artist”, because if you look at just one of them, it almost looks like the lifetime work of a living artist. We added the algo-artist as an additional attribute, since it is a great way to filter the collection to find things that go well together, and to get a deeper insight on how the AI works.

*Please remember, the Eponym collection was created by you. If an art style is rare it is because most people decided against minting it, not because of an inherent limitation of the algorithm. Buy art because you love it.

Our Vision

Eponym is the world’s first and largest collectively created NFT art collection. It is the results of the creativity and artist sensitivity of more than 3000 collectors from around the world. In its essence, Eponym is a decentralised AI art collection.

The team at ART AI has been working for more than two years to make AI generated art more accessible and more mainstream. We feel we have finally found the ultimate way to do this — transfer the power to the community.
You are the artists. You are the curators. You are the collectors. You get to decide.

We are here to facilitate the creative power of the community, and we do it with technology and data. During the last two years we have worked on developing the algorithms and collecting the data underlying our AI. We developed the cutting edge AI in generated art, and collected huge amounts of data on the preferences of humans to optimise it. A lot of this is possible thanks to our previous projects — Art AI Gallery and Artifly (more on the technology coming soon).
Eponym is the natural next stage in our journey of democratising art.

This is why we are committing to following these values:

1. The community will be the ultimate curator of the art
2. The community will decide the value of the art
3. Our collectors should be rewarded for helping us create this amazing project
4. New people should have a way to participate in this project in the future
5. We will always listen to the community, and be available for communication
6. We will be transparent with the community and explain the rational behind every decision we make

(If you are not already a member this is a good time to join our discord channel, and follow us on Twitter).

To advance these goals, we are working on a series of new features that will enhance Eponym going forward.

Two years of hard work building the technology & collecting the data that is driving the most advanced AI Art in history, plus one night of exploding creativity led to the creation of what we believe is one of the most impressive 10,000 artwork collection out there. Now lets make it better.

It’s decentralised. We make it better, together

The drop night (and yes it was leaked, we did not intentionally launch the drop during NFL on a Sunday afternoon) was a hectic one, like it should have been, creating 10k pieces of AI art based on unique texts is no easy task, and getting 10,000 generations to harmonize is done only through the chaos of creation. It is time for the community to become the critic.

Not all texts are equal. Not all designs are the same. We must destroy, we must rebuild, we must improve. The community will decide which Eponyms will remain available and which Eponyms will become irrelevant. It is up to you to decide what Eponym will look like in the future.
To allow this, we will introduce a swapping mechanism — letting you exchange two existing Eponyms for a new one. The new Eponyms will be listed in a different collection — Eponym Gen 2. The exchanged Eponyms will be sent to a “graveyard” address — you’ll be able to see the exchanged art but it won’t be tradable.

This will allow us to keep collectively improving the quality of the collection, while allowing more people to participate in the art creation and curation process in a way that is rewarding for our early collectors.

More Information About The Art (Properties)

To help you decide what stays and what goes and assess the value of your art, and browse through the collection, next week we will expose the attributes of the existing Eponyms.

The attributes will only include the objective properties of the art piece: style (realism, abstract, etc.), content (people, landscape, etc.), colors, number of words, etc.

The properties are a tool to help you find the art you love. Deciding its value is purely up to you.

More Perks

To add more value to owning an Eponym, we will introduce a website that will allow collectors to get a 7K high definition file of their Eponym.

We are amazed by this community and we want all of you to enjoy your art in many forms and present it however you wish — so watch out, physical art collectibles coming.

Finally, stay tuned. We are working on additional ways to enhance your ability to govern how this collection develops in the future.