Anthony Luo

"Introducing 16047 38 2898" is a 7-flip lenticular print from Anthony's "Lexicon 4178 44" series that reveals how large language models like ChatGPT "read" text as tokens (numbers) rather than words. OpenAI's groundbreaking announcement of ChatGPT is rendered in both its English text and its GPT-3.5 (cl100k_base) tokenized form. As you view the artwork from different perspectives, words and tokens dissolve back and forth — physically representing the contrast between human and AI language processing, one that occurs billions of times a day yet remains invisible. Despite the recent proliferation of large language models, the mechanics of how they process language are almost entirely hidden from users; this piece makes that contrast tangible and physical.

For visual clarity, the work uses word-level rather than full-string tokenization, aligning each word and punctuation mark with its token(s) while excluding spaces. Each unique token is assigned a perceptually optimized color through a multi-stage pipeline developed and refined over several months: manual selection of seed colors, algorithmic generation of a palette of colors using golden-ratio hue spacing and farthest-point sampling to maximize perceptual distance in CIELAB space, and simulated annealing at the word level that maximizes contrast between spatial neighbors (inspired by Josef Albers' color interaction theory) while balancing overall color composition. This work is not generative AI art: it is created by a custom algorithmic pipeline in combination with deliberate manual curation.