Web, A Deterministic Universe, Net Art (NFT) Original

Web is a monument to the hyperlink, a poem dedicated to machine learning and a computer's dérive within itself. — Jan Robert Leegte

What if an AI would create the internet? What if a machine learning model would take the basic building blocks of the web and generate a network of interlinked web pages, devoid of any meaningful content, but full of familiar elements, layouts and visual diversity? Those were the questions that net-artist Jan Robert Leegte approached us with. Web is an attempt to answer those questions.

Web is a generative network of 1000 webpages on the Ethereum blockchain. All pages and the links between them are generated and form a deterministic universe. Each HTML webpage is unique in color and composition as well as the position within the network. Each page has a unique title which is an anagram of 'Document'. The favicon is a uniquely generated icon using the color palette of the page. Through triangulating distances between the pages based on their properties, links are generated to pages in proximity. The holistic beauty is that the code that runs in each token contains the DNA of every page and link in the whole network. A single NFT could recreate the whole web.

Initially, the idea was to generate HTML/CSS layouts using AI, and so work started with GPT-3 and later ChatGPT to output HTML code. The problem was that ChatGPT only has existing web layouts to work with resulting in really bland output. ChatGPT only knows examples of web layouts and thus can recreate them really well – but generating output that is out of the box is much harder.

To solve this, the team combined many different AI tools, ranging from language and image generation to image analysis, structured data generation based on image and text data and more. Initially they worked on an IPFS stored output of AI api calls, but they weren't that enthusiastic about the results and didn't feel happy with IPFS. The idea came to shift it to a fully on-chain project, and Jake Allen joined the team as Solidity developer. To move fully on-chain meant letting go of AI generated content, as it would demand too much data to be uploaded to the tokens, and the team set off creating a fully deterministic generative web inspired by the AI research we had done.

Web uses vanilla JavaScript. As soon as a page is loaded, a “genesis seed” generates the entire set of pages, including unique parameters and aesthetic qualities for each individual one. It then calculates similarities between pages to form links, generating a network in which a path can be found between any two pages. Because the algorithm is deterministic, and the genesis seed is stored in the contract, each page is sure to generate the same network. Finally, the loaded page looks itself up in the generated network and displays itself. In the spirit of permanence, each page is in this way both completely embedded in and completely independent from other pages, giving each a “stem cell” quality. If in the future all but one of these pages is lost, the entire network can be rebuilt from this one page.

Each page from Web has a unique responsive layout that varies in complexity, coverage and color. Pages feature typical web interface elements like (radio) buttons, text inputs, (broken) images and dropdown menus. These elements link to other pages in Web. To make exploring Web easier and allow for bookmarking and minting, a simple UI was added, which also contains a map revealing how much of Web has been discovered.

More information about the project can be found on web.leegte.org.