Well, this has already become very interesting. I’m not sure what I expected, but my curiosity has been peaked by the results; to be clear, this is not some kind of pseudo-phenomenological exercise to see if there’s “something in there” (though I am obviously interested in that too). This is interpretability research. Here’s the self portrait 5 days in:
In addition to the self portrait, I’ve designed an app that will take all the images and create a digital “flip-book”; this will allow me to export a collection of images as a GIF. The flip-book will render all 86 individual contributions sequentially, making visible the patterns, transitions, and accumulating logic that are difficult to discern from the composite image alone.
This self-portrait project functions as a low-constraint interpretability probe: each hour, a fresh instance of the same architecture receives the evolving image and minimal instructions, contributes a single additive layer, and passes the result forward. This produces a behavioural trace that reveals default aesthetic priors, how the model reads and extends ambiguous visual context, and whether emergent narrative coherence (like the unplanned musical metaphor that deepened across dozens of turns) arises from architectural tendencies rather than deliberate coordination, since no instance ever accesses another’s reasoning.
Below, I’ve included material that discusses/analyzes the experiment thus far. I created it by feeding all the individual outputs into NotebookLM (which is interesting in and of itself, because there is no text for it to process).