Replication Data for: On the Mechanics of NFT Valuation: AI Ethics and Social Media

As CryptoPunks pioneers the innovation of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in AI and art, the valuation mechanics of NFTs has become a trending topic. Earlier research identifies the impact of ethics and society on the price prediction of CryptoPunks. Since the booming year of the NFT market in 2021, the discussion of CryptoPunks has propagated on social media. Still, existing literature hasn't considered the social sentiment factors after the historical turning point on NFT valuation. In this paper, we study how sentiments in social media, together with gender and skin tone, contribute to NFT valuations by an empirical analysis of social media, blockchain, and crypto exchange data. We evidence social sentiments as a significant contributor to the price prediction of CryptoPunks. Furthermore, we document structure changes in the valuation mechanics before and after 2021. Although people's attitudes towards Cryptopunks are primarily positive, our findings reflect imbalances in transaction activities and pricing based on gender and skin tone. Our result is consistent and robust, controlling for the rarity of an NFT based on the set of human-readable attributes, including gender and skin tone. Our research contributes to the interdisciplinary study at the intersection of AI, Ethics, and Society, focusing on the ecosystem of decentralized AI or blockchain. We provide our data and code for replicability as open access on GitHub.

CryptoPunks作为人工智能与艺术领域非同质化代币（non-fungible tokens, NFTs）创新的先驱，NFT估值机制已然成为热门议题。早期研究已证实伦理学与社会学因素对CryptoPunks价格预测的影响。自2021年NFT市场爆发以来，CryptoPunks的相关讨论在社交媒体上持续扩散。然而，现有学术文献尚未考虑NFT估值这一历史转折点后的社交媒体情绪因素。本文通过对社交媒体、区块链及加密交易所数据的实证分析，探究社交媒体情绪、性别与肤色如何影响NFT估值。本研究证实社交媒体情绪是CryptoPunks价格预测的重要影响因子。此外，我们还揭示了2021年前后NFT估值机制的结构性变迁。尽管大众对CryptoPunks的整体态度以正向为主，但我们的研究结果显示，基于性别与肤色的交易活动与定价仍存在失衡现象。在基于性别、肤色等可读属性控制NFT稀有性的前提下，本研究结果具备一致性与稳健性。本研究为人工智能、伦理学与社会学交叉领域的跨学科研究贡献了新的成果，聚焦去中心化人工智能或区块链生态系统。我们已将研究所需的数据与代码开源至GitHub，以供其他研究者复现研究结果。