On December 11, 2023, Portugal issued a 10 euro coin titled ‘O Mundo Digital’ (‘The Digital World’). This was one among the many coins they issue throughout the year. The difference lies in the promotional materials where they proudly announced that INCM, the Portuguese mint, had collaborated with the Centre for Informatics and Systems of the University of Coimbra (CISUC) to create the first coin in history designed by an artificial intelligence.
However, this is only half true: it is indeed the first one issued by a public mint, but not truly the first of its kind.
The design process of the coin is detailed on the CISUC website. Although relatively short, I found it quite interesting: basically, they trained an AI from scratch.
At the beginning of the project, they experimented with commercial AIs like DALL-E, Midjourney, or Stable Diffusion, but they discarded them because, and I quote: “These attempts gave us expectable and disappointing results. The coins were clichés and pastiche imagery, including the popular representation of AI as the profile of a female face with a digital circuit on the brain (usually facing left).”
Contrary to what the INCM said, CISUC never claimed that this coin was the first of its kind in the world.
Which coin was really the first one?
The first coin truly designed by an artificial intelligence, to my knowledge, is a 5000 CFA franc coin issued by Chad, released on October 19, 2023, by the Pressburg Mint, a private company based in Slovakia.
What’s the design like? Well, it’s the popular representation of AI as the profile of a female face with a digital circuit on the brain, looking to the left.
Exactly what the CISUC said they didn’t want for their coin.
This makes me think that:
- The design from the Pressburg Mint is rather lazy. They might not have taken the very first thing DALL-E or Midjourney showed them, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they settled for the second.
- Although the CISUC project started on August 1, 2022, well before the Chad coin was released, the criticism they make is so specific that I believe they must have seen it at some point.
- The INCM pulled their claim that the Portuguese coin was the first out of thin air, without verifying anything at all.
When the Portuguese coin came out, I reported it on ColeMone’s Spanish-language Miniblog on Telegram, and I repeated like a little parrot the information in the promotional materials of INCM. My thanks to the reader who alerted me to the existence of the coin from Chad, which is the same person who sent me the images of their own one.
Let this article serve as a correction to that post on the Miniblog.