The images created might not have been all that cool, but they do kind of provide a springboard for some questions about how the text is converted to images. All the questions you didn’t know you had are answered in a whole bunch of detail on the JPEG Wikipedia page

Failing to understand that Wikipedia page, I guess one way to get some insight is to convert an image into text.

There are 3,686,400 characters in a digital picture (694kb) converted into a string of text.

Here are characters 56,000 – 60,000:

Pretty ugly. In fact, these characters are different from text editor to text editor, so they probably don’t match any sort of character encoding and are more just a representation of the bytes that are actually being stored in the file. But we can definitely see that regular English characters aren’t going to make much of an image – explaining why we get such ugly blobs of pixels with Beyond Good and Evil.

For reference, here is what Beyond Good and Evil looks like when its text is repeated 24 times until it hits about 9.5 million characters.