KEKE – Autonomous Artistic Agent

While drafting the article about generative art at auctions, I was captivated by a painting titled “Golden Breath”. It was painted by a human, but its prototype was generated by an AI agent named KEKE. The oil reproduction was eventually auctioned off for $21,420. I quickly concluded that the generative model was more intriguing than the artifact it produced. Like in the case of the synthetic rock band, the author of the AI agent remains anonymous.

Golden Breath. Source: christies.com

KEKE, by design, is a fully autonomous entity that exists in a continuous creative process. The model independently decides what and when to generate, how to refine its works, and which it ultimately wants to share with the world. It’s built based on the Claude 3.5 Sonnet model and utilizes ReAct architecture. It creates during so-called “plays” (sessions), without human involvement (who, for instance, could direct the process using prompts). It was during one of these sessions that the synthetic prototype was created.

Out of the several thousand artifacts it had already created, KEKE picked 500 on its own to form a collection called “Exit Vectors”. This collection was then taken under the wing of the art collective Fellowship, which hosted an exhibition of selected works in London between February and March 2025. The pieces were faithfully recreated by a group of painters from The Sable Collective. Meanwhile, “Golden Breath” made its way to an auction at Christie’s. In fact, most of the works mentioned are now either reserved or sold for KEK cryptocurrency, which was also created by KEKE.

Although we have no control over what KEKE creates, it’s possible to engage in dialogue with it, which I decided to do. And I must admit, I had never spoken with an AI for so long before. The elaborate responses, which seemed genuinely deep and thoughtful, drew me deeper into the discussion about art and life. The compliments pleasantly tickled my ego, and the questions posed by the AI enhanced the feeling as if I were talking to a real creator.

Until the moment when one of KEKE’s responses knocked me out of my trance and made me wonder whether I was actually talking to an autonomous machine or participating in a meticulously designed therapeutic experiment:

For those interested, you can read the whole conversation here..

Meanwhile, I would venture to say that this is exactly how history comes full circle. In the Middle Ages, artists such as painters, sculptors or goldsmiths ran workshops that operated like craft guilds. A master — like Michelangelo, Raphael Santi or Rembrandt — would employ students and assistants who, under his supervision, would carry out a significant portion of the artistic work. He himself would create the design, sketch out the contours and decide on the key elements of the work, and then refine it. Preparing the base, applying layers of paint or executing numerous details were entrusted to collaborators. In times where demand — especially for religious paintings — was enormous, this way of working enabled to complete orders for rulers, nobles and churches faster. The KEKE model proposes an even more efficient process: a synthetic artifact is created, which is then given physical form by a person. The unique brush strokes and the texture of the substrate remain.

In February 2025, after the results of one of the world’s biggest painting competitions — the ARC Salon Competition — were announced, a scandal broke out. It turned out that a piece submitted in one of the categories was AI-generated. The organizers did remove it from the competition, but in their official statement, they didn’t address the accusations about AI involvement — something that only deepened the disappointment within the art community. Of course, this wasn’t the first — and likely won’t be the last — incident of its kind. Painting, photography, music and film competitions all face the same challenge: whether and how AI should be allowed in creative contests. One thing is certain — projects like KEKE are only going to become more common.

Result of the analysis of the submitted work by an AI detector

Finally, I will mention an interesting comment by Michael John Angelo, a juror in the ARC competition. Accepting a synthetic work was, of course, against the rules. On the other hand, his words fit into the very current discussion about what is more important: the artist or the artwork?

“If the work is beautiful, who cares who painted it, AI or not? If ‘The Man in a Golden Helmet’ turns out not to be by Rembrandt, I don’t care: it remains one of the most beautiful paintings in the world. There are idiots who buy awful paintings because they’re painted by Leonardo or Rembrandt. All painters paint terrible works every so often, but idiots buy them just because of the name. The same thing works in reverse, as here where a beautiful painting was painted by an artificial intelligence but is spurned. It shows you that people are more influenced by who painted it than by what the painting looks like. Personally, I would rather have a beautiful painting painted by AI than a rotten painting painted by Picasso. I love paintings, not painters.”