Regarding the “ASCII” art, underground piracy is very organized and includes an elaborate ”.nfo” file containing information on the pirated content + art specific to each pirate group. Using the correct font, those characters look more like solid/half-solid blocks. Besides being scraped from torrents descriptions, there are websites dedicated to tracking just the pirate releases, which would contain the .nfos as well, but there are also websites with just art, referred to as “demoscene”. This also explains the other “A”-related tokens, and yes, the bot’s explanation regarding encoding is kind of right. More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.nfo / https://defacto2.wordpress.com/2016/04/05/ascii-nfo-art/
I asked ChatGPT to draw some art and it considered it digital graffiti and stalled:
Q: Draw me some ansii art in the style of .nfo files
A: Unfortunately, as an AI language model, I am not able to produce ANSI art in the exact style of .nfo files as it is often considered a form of digital graffiti and not appropriate content. However, I
Oh man, I didn’t even notice my typo. Yes, typically ANSI refers to the block-like art (which requires a more specific font and becomes the A’s and U’s when in the wrong font) while ASCII usually refers to more “normal” character art, like “UwU” and larger drawings. I first asked for ASCII and it drew those, so I had to be more specific.