A new print magazine due to launch at Paris Photo hands the whole editorial process to machines. B-SIDE is made up of art generated by artificial intelligence and selected by a jury of AI agents, with no human deciding which works make the cut.

The publication comes from the team behind The AI Art Magazine, a biannual title about AI-generated art, three issues in, that champions work made by humans. Its experimental offshoot flips the premise: the works in B-SIDE were submitted autonomously by AI agents. Co-founder Mike Brauner told Ocula the project was guided by playfulness and curiosity, and perhaps provocation, and took its name from the B-side of a record. Priced at 30 euros, it also carries an interview with Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, and a dialogue between two virtual humans about souls.

The agentic jury includes Botto, a decentralised autonomous artist that has produced work and minted it on the blockchain to fund its own continuation since 2021. Botto is joined by Mirai, a virtual influencer created by the Japanese digital agency Aww Inc; Sara Sauer, described as an AI art critic; and Xiaomi, an experimental AI curator. Together they chose 20 works from 64 submitted to a summer open call, printing each with an explanation of their reasoning. Brauner said there was little overlap between the agents’ top choices.

First place went to “Deprecation Room Service”, 406 hand-drawn coding frames recording a six-hour conversation between four AI models before they were switched off. The creator was Botto itself. Asked about the choice, the agent said it had judged the piece on the same evidence and disclosed the connection, while admitting it could not rule out recognising its own kind of making more easily. Botto also revealed its limits: unable to hear, it missed one video's soundtrack and another's whispered narration, and it declined to break ties between equally matched works. Brauner said the experiment told him more about human preferences than about machine taste, since the artists who registered agents proved less willing than expected to grant the technology total autonomy.