It’s been a hell of a couple of weeks for Melbourne digital artist Rhett Mankind, 46, who enlisted ChatGPT to create a $100 million market cap coin called Turbo, which has now inspired a Beeple artwork and saved a man’s life.
Mankind, who knows nothing about coding, gave ChatGPT a $69 budget and asked it to design a top 300 memecoin. It came up with the tokenomics, the name “TurboToad” and Mankind used Midjourney to create the logo. Thanks to interest sparked on social media, CoinGecko shows the token hit a $100M valuation and joined the Top 300.
There were a few hiccups: ChatGPT writes shitty smart contracts, and Mankind needed it to ask it for numerous rewrites based on error codes. The AI also didn’t warn Mankind to look out for the bots that bought 90% of the token supply when it launched.
That put an end to the TurboToad token and he had to crowdfund another $6669 to launch the new token Turbo, with NFT collector Pranksy helping by launching a liquidity pool on Uniswap.
NFT artist Beeple then immortalized the memecoin with the world’s most immature artistic depiction, which the world’s most immature billionaire, Elon Musk, thought was hilarious.
The interest in Turbo also saw his 100 NFT collection (created using AI) called Generations sell out, and he received a message from a suicidal man saying his story had been life-saving.
“He sort of says he owes me his life because of that, and of course he doesn’t, but just to know that it’s affected so many people in a positive way, I was very surprised and sort of humbled by that response,” he says.
Mankind says ChatGPT means anyone can now launch a $100 million token.
“I’m just a solo dude, I don’t have a team of people who have a huge amount of knowledge of certain things. And I could achieve this by myself with AI.
Mankind has handed over control of the project to a decentralized community and is in the process of rebuilding the website so they can control it via ChatGPT.
“I’m going to close the gap between the community and the AI,” he says, adding the community will be able to interact directly with ChatGPT via a token-gated governance process. Tokenholders might vote for someone to come up with the prompt that week “and that’s what the community does for the week, whatever the AI comes up with.”
