Our conversation with the Bonsai team and artist Adria Masnou about their new model on TITLES

Today we’re stoked to share that the creators behind the widely loved and used culture currency of the Lens ecosystem, Bonsai, is launching a model on TITLES. Below you’ll find an interview with Carlos and Nate, the founders of Bonsai. In addition, we brought in the talented artist Adria Masnou to talk about his experience working on the art and training set for the Bonsai model. We’re super excited to support the founders, artists, and communities behind tokens like Bonsai.

Create with Lil Bonsai Maker, here.

INTERVIEW WITH CARLOS, NATE, AND ADRIA

So what is Bonsai and where did the idea come from?

Bonsai started as a memecoin that we airdropped to active Lens profiles and would be used as incentives for anything we built for MadFi - our original project centered around creator monetization. The idea was partly inspired by $DEGEN but with Lens Protocol actually being onchain, it allowed us to think more broadly about how Bonsai could be used as a currency for any Open Action. We picked the name Bonsai as it’s a cute little tree that can be found in any garden, bringing peace and tranquility.

Tell us more about what the Lens community and how Bonsai ties into it?

The Lens community is made up of creators, builders, and early adopters of onchain social. Open any of the clients (e.g. Hey, Orb) and you immediately notice the difference in how people express themselves; it’s a very welcoming community that invites you to post whatever content you want, and we believe this - in combination with a culture currency like Bonsai - allows creators to flourish and monetize their creative output however they want. For now, we have collectable content as the primary driver of creator revenue, but I think as more Open Actions come onchain, we’ll see creative ways to earn $BONSAI on social feed - not possible in web2 or other social protocols.

What inspired you to get your own Bonsai model created?

We know how important it is to have a steady flow of branded content on the social feed, and the power of user generated content (UGC) to empower community members to remix and publish their own interpretations. There’s a lot of untapped meme potential for Bonsai, and we would love to see what the community comes up with. Once we heard about what TITLES offers, we knew it was the special sauce that would take our marketing to the next level, and we’re super excited by the art that was used just to train the Lil Bonsai Maker model.

Adria, can you tell us more about your process for creating the Lil Bonsai mascot?

The process has both a creative and a technical side. In regards to the technical side, an important part has been done before starting any individual project. The process comes down to:

• Prompt engineering: In my case, it’s been an iterative process that started years ago and it’s still ongoing. While there’s plenty of fine-tuning for every new project I make, not everything has to be done ad-hoc, since I created a prompt library that helps me not start from scratch every time and provides a more cohesive style. It’s one of the most critical aspects since the ability to convey your ideas onto the actual artwork depends directly on this capacity/ability.

• Color work / Grading: Pretty much self-explanatory, but the perfection of colouring is a key aspect of my works.

• Composition: Just like with the color work, composition is one of the most fundamental aspects to consider when illustrating.

When it comes to the creative side, the process is characterised by:

• Search for references & inspiration: I always like to be orderly and find proper inspiration and references to enrich my artworks. These can come from the most diverse contexts: traditional or cryptonative artists, all kinds of physical media, manga/anime, and many more.

• Definition of the concept: Probably the most important piece of the puzzle, and the hardest to define, since the process to come to this is completely managed by the right side of my brain, and therefore is characterised by improvisation.

• Iterative execution: I like to jump into trying the concepts I create as soon as I can so that I can test if they actually work in the context of the work I’m doing. Oftentimes ideas can seem compelling but then be either too hard to execute properly or simply disappointing when tried, so it really comes down to trial and error. Once I’m certain the concept works, I commit on it and start creating the series, then curating it and perfecting the pieces until I get to the final result.

Adria, what did you learn about creating work to train a model?

I was familiar with the topic since I’m an avid reader of the latest developments on generative AI. Getting to know Sören and chatting with him has also helped me understand new aspects of it. The one thing that is still mind-blowing to me is the ability to train functional models with such small training samples. I’m looking forward to learn more about it and understand it in more depth.

How do you think AI plays into community creation and tokens?

LLMs are great for speeding up the creative process, as we’ve seen with ChatGPT and Midjourney. What the model usually lacks is specific training, in order to inform what it generates. I think the models trained on specific datasets of content (with specific styles, themes, etc) can produce content closest to the desired goal. With crypto and AI - UGC can not only be monetized by the community, but also the original creator by way of attribution/provenance. This is very exciting for projects with a token, as you can really unlock the creative output of the community.

Adria, what do you hope to see people do with the model?

I don’t have too many preconceived ideas on it, I’d rather wait for people to start experimenting with it and let them surprise me. I’m sure their creativity will surpass any of our expectations. The only thing I’m hoping for is that people enjoy tinkering with it and that it serves as a medium to help them express their creativity. Also, as always, to keep feeding the interest and curiosity towards crypto-native artistic expression, which would be my ultimate goal in the space.

Anything else fun you’d like to plug?

We have a user generated content contest going on with Shinsei Galverse right now with $BONSAI prizes available. The Bonsai NFT collection will be getting an upgrade to version 2.0 a bit later this year to include rarities and more so keep an eye out for ones that you like. There’s some great incentives on our Timeswap lending pools and liquidity rewards that you can earn right now and keep an eye out on P00ls creators in the coming weeks.

LIL BONSAI MAKER ON TITLES

Lil Bonsai Maker is available now on TITLES mobile and web applications. At TITLES, we build creative tools powered by artist-owned AI models. We help artists maintain ownership of their likeness in AI by making it easy to train, distribute, and monetize their own custom models. Since launch, TITLES has been used to create over 32,000 creations using artist-trained models each attributing and sharing earnings back with their owners. If you’re an artist or IP holder looking to create your own model with TITLES, reach out to us on Twitter or Farcaster.

Create with Lil Bonsai Maker, here.

Much love,

- TITLES