51 Ways to Spell the Image Giraffe: The Hidden Politics of Token Languages in Generative AI
Ting-Chun Liu, Leon-Etienne Kühr
39th Chaos Communication Congress (39C3): Power Cycles · Day 2 · Saal Ground
This talk, "51 Ways to Spell the Image Giraffe," delves into the often-overlooked yet foundational process of **tokenization** in generative AI, particularly its profound impact on text-to-image models. Presented by media artists Ting-Chun Liu and Leon-Etienne Kühr, the research explores how the seemingly neutral conversion of human language into computable units embeds significant political, cultural, and economic biases, shaping what AI can generate and how it understands the world. The speakers highlight that tokenization, a process preceding neural network involvement, is a critical bottleneck that dictates the accessibility, cost, and even the semantic interpretation of prompts, revealing a hidden "token language" distinct from natural language.