At a glance it looks like it could be just iterative texture sampling.

The difference is when creating each pixel, there’s no coordinate to look up, instead it’s using only a set of rules like Conway’s game of life.

But the rules come from a neural network trained on the image, so… it’s kind of memorizing enough information to effectively do the same thing as texture sampling, but using only local information.

I’m sure I’m missing something about how it works or what makes it interesting…