What does Satoshi Nakamoto look like? AI provides some answers

The biggest unanswered question in crypto (aside from when will the US make understandable rules and regulations) is: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? While some have claimed to be the enigmatic creator of Bitcoin and others have had their lives turned upside down by media speculation, the mystery continues.

So I thought that now that AI seems to know and see everything, it might give us a glimpse of what Satoshi might look like.

I started with ChatGPT4, which doesn’t generate images, but is the AI ​​text engine that’s eating the world these days. I asked what prompt to use for sister AI, Dall-E. It recommended: “Generate a series of artistic renderings that imagine the possible appearance of Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious creator of Bitcoin. Feel free to explore different styles, ethnicities and time periods while including visual elements related to cryptocurrency and technology in the illustrations.”

Cool cool. I fed it into Midjourney, curious to see what would come out.

The first to appear was a Jedi Knight, an Obi-Wan Kenobi type character. Midjourney has clearly been watching too much Star Wars:

The next one looked just as mythical:

But then it went on another tangent and coughed up a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Dumbledore:

For some reason, all of these Nakamotos have beards, which is weird. Or maybe that’s how Midjourney interpreted “mysterious?” Whatever.

I then fed that prompt into DALL-E and got this, which is definitely T-shirt worthy:

So for giggles I used the same prompt but asked for a picture:

WTF? Battahoch? Battahoch. Even ChatGPT4 was confused: “Sorry, but I couldn’t find any information on the term ‘Battahoch’. It could be a typo or a word from a work of fiction, a specific subculture or a term that has not gained widespread recognition.”

But let’s not stop there. A booming movement in Web3 says, “Satoshi is female,” I asked Midjourney and Dall-E to imagine what this mysterious woman might look like.

Definitely mysterious in a kind of Botticelli/Venus-y way. And there were two almost anime-like treatments:

Some theories suggest that Nakamoto is a collective of people interested in digital money back on the cypherpunk mailing list when Nakamoto first contacted Hal Finney about his new creation. Proponents of the “Satoshi is a group of people” theory include Finney, Blockstream CEO Adam Back, OG cryptographer Nick Szabo and Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin in that group. Appropriately asked, here’s what the Satoshi conglomerate looks like:

Wow, Lubin really looks like Walter White.

Finally, I tried running the usual suspects through Playground, and what it produced was, well, the stuff of bad dreams:

In fact, I regret ever starting down this path.