51 Ways to Spell the Image Giraffe: The Hidden Politics of Token Languages in Generative AI

Generative AI models don't operate on human languages – they speak in **tokens**. Tokens are computational fragments that deconstruct language into subword units, stored in large dictionaries. These tokens encode not only language but also political ideologies, corporate interests, and cultural biases even before model training begins. Social media handles like *realdonaldtrump*, brand names like *louisvuitton*, or even *!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!* exist as single tokens, while other words remain fragmented. Through various artistic and adversarial experiments, we demonstrate that tokenization is a political act that determines what can be represented and how images become computable through language. Tokens are the fragments of words that generative models use to process language, the step that breaks text into subword units before any neural networks are involved. There are 51 ways to combine tokens to spell the word giraffe using existing vocabulary: from a single token **giraffe** to splits