The Future of Non-fungible Tokens: PNFTs as a Medium for Programmatic Art Enabling a Fully Realized AI-Driven Art Ecosystem

This chapter outlines the current limitations of art when utilizing non-fungible tokens. We argue that smart contracts, the blockchain, and other distributed ledger technologies can be utilized beyond an index for art metadata, ownership, provenance, or distribution, and has the potential to be a medium for the creation of new artworks based on concepts of generative, algorithmic, conceptual, and process-based artworks. This paves the way for artificial intelligence (AI) to move forward from simply creating artworks via algorithms, neural networks, and other methods, to a potential future where these AI-generated artworks could also be bought, sold, distributed, collected, curated, and exhibited by other AI, thereby creating a completely virtual, AI-driven art ecosystem.