Strange Chinese on South African album cover
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From Charles Belov:
YouTube music's algorithm suggested to me an album, 24 Hours in Soweto, in the amapiano genre that I love which mostly comes from the Zulu community in South Africa. I was struck by the album cover, which seems to have some random Chinese characters, some garbled. Wondering if it's AI art. Can you make any sense of it?
If the Chinese on the cover is AI-generated, I'd have to say that the machine did a pretty good job of mimicking what characters look like and how they are constructed.
Although at the opposite extreme of complexity, in terms of conveying meaning, they're not much worse than this:
or these:
Selected readings
- "How to generate fake Chinese characters automatically" (12/30/15)
- "The unpredictability of Chinese character formation and pronunciation" (2/6/12)
- "Chinese characters formed from letters of the alphabet" (8/20/14)
- "The infinitude of Chinese characters" (9/9/20) — with a huge bibliography
- "AI writes sinoglyphs" (2/25/24)
- "Stochastic popinjay and Perso-Arabic art / adab" (1/20/24)
- "AI is producing ‘fake’ Indigenous art trained on real artists’ work without permission: One Indigenous artist said the process of using their art to train AI models that competes with them for work is a ‘very colonial mindset’." Cam Wilson, Crikey (Jan 19, 2024). — just to keep up to date on some other aspects of AI
- "More AI shenanigans" (10/21/23)
- "AI encroachments" (7/21/23)
Steve B said,
February 5, 2026 @ 9:29 pm
The vertical text on the sign looks like Hiragana to me rather than Chinese.
Christian Horn said,
February 5, 2026 @ 9:58 pm
Agreed, the vertical looks _almost_ like Katakana, but it's not. Even considering we have sometimes styled/morphed Katakana, these have to stay within accepted limits to stay recognizable.
I suspect also the upper line to not be proper Kanji, but can't say for sure. For me, the interesting thing is that Katakana- and Kanji-alikes are not mixed here.