From pixels to metal: AI-empowered numismatic art

This paper describes our response to a unique challenge presented by the Portuguese National Press-Mint: to use Artificial Intelligence to design a commemorative coin that celebrates the “digital world.” We explain the process of this coin’s co-creation, from conceptualisation to production, highlighting the design process, the underlying rationale, key obstacles encountered, and the technical innovations and developments made to meet the challenge. These include the development of an evolutionary art system guided by Contrastive Language–Image Pre-training (CLIP) and Machine Learning-based aesthetic models, a system for prompt evolution, and a representation for encoding genotypes in mintable format. This collaboration produced a limited edition 10 euro silver proof coin, with a total of 4000 units minted by the National Press-Mint. The coin was met with enthusiasm, selling out within two months. This work contributes to Computational Creativity, particularly co-creativity, co-design, and digital art, and represents a significant step in using Artificial Intelligence for Numismatics.