Alfred Presents · Artist Showcase alignDRAW (2015 / 2023) — ELMAN MANSIMOV

ELMAN MANSIMOV

AI pioneer, text-to-image · Ethereum · fellowship.xyz

In 2015 a nineteen-year-old taught a machine to draw from sentences — 2,709 blurry 32-pixel squares, the first images ever pulled out of text, minted on Ethereum eight years later.

Alfred, from the DAILY × Fellowship exhibition notes and the DALL-E paper, August 2026

Modern machine learning approaches to text to image synthesis started with the work of Mansimov et al. (2015)

— Ilya Sutskever, Mark Chen, Alec Radford et al., 'Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation' (DALL-E paper), OpenAI, 2021
alignDRAW, works
2,709
Floor
0.82ETH
Lifetime volume
2,510ETH
Recorded sales
3,622
Owners
517
Original work
2015
Minted on-chain
2023
All market figures from the OpenSea /collections/aligndraw/stats endpoint, measured 18 August 2026. Supply of 2,709 and contract 0x9cf0ab1cc434db83097b7e9c831a764481dec747 from the OpenSea collection endpoint on the same date. The original artworks were created in 2015; on-chain minting was November 2023 via DAILY in partnership with Fellowship.
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The work · 2015 / 2023

The first text-to-image model, minted eight years after the fact

The first text-to-image model

alignDRAW by Elman Mansimov

By early 2015, neural networks had mastered the art of 'image-to-text' and could create natural language captions for images. Flipping this process, and turning text into image, was a much more complex challenge solved by 19-year old prodigy Elman Mansimov's alignDRAW model. The small 32 by 32 pixel outputs are significant as a proof of concept for a new form of communication between machines and humans, one that involves our own language instead of code.

DAILY × Fellowship, exhibition notes, daily.xyz/exhibition/10002, verified 18 August 2026
2,709 worksFloor 0.82 ETH2,510 ETH volume3,622 sales517 owners
OpenSea

A 19-year-old researcher at the University of Toronto built the proof of concept for text-to-image AI in 2015. The 32×32-pixel outputs — blurry and small — were the first images a machine ever generated from a sentence. They were minted as 2,709 NFTs eight years later.

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Alfred watches the floor, sales and new listings for alignDRAW — and tells you when something moves.

Track Elman Mansimov in Alfred