UMA was created in 2002 by David Horvath & Sun-Min Kim. On May 7th, 2021 they released UMA under a "No Copyright" license which is now understood as CC0. Many creators and collectors have been inspired by this move. The UMADAO was started by Matas in June 2022 to promote UMA to the crypto art community and to the world.

Deep fakes are synthetic media in which a person in an existing image or video is replaced with someone else's likeness. "Deep Fake UMA" was chosen as a title for this project an allusion to our cultural reservations about AI art. In addition, Cryptoart often plays with the notion of the counterfeit seen in Right-click and Save As guy and Fake Rare Pepes.