18.14 From image repair to structural assurance

The preceding evidence sequence controls the declaration, observer, and admission rule in increasingly realistic scenes. A complementary set of external challenge cases asks a more immediate systems question: what happens when ARTISTIC is placed around an existing image generator? The resulting role is broader than post-processing. ARTISTIC may admit a structurally valid image unchanged, repair a localized violation, request another observation, reject and regenerate a globally inconsistent scene, or abstain when the relevant fact is outside the frame.

This changes the central comparison. ARTISTIC is not proposed as a replacement for a more capable generator. It is a provider-neutral layer in which visual correctness can be declared, observed, and audited. Its marginal value depends on the base model, the domain, the specificity of the request, the cost of a failure, and the cost of another generation or edit.