Strange Chinese on South African album cover

Language Log 2026-02-05

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