Digital artifact

A digital artifact is any undesired alteration in data introduced in a digital process by an involved technique and/or technology.

Possible causes

Hardware malfunction: In computer graphics, visual artifacts may be generated whenever a hardware component (eg. processor, memory chip, cabling) malfunctions, causing data corruption. Malfunction may be caused by physical damage, overheating (sometimes due to GPU overclocking), etc. Common types of hardware artifacts are texture corruption and T-vertices in 3D graphics, and pixelization in MPEG compressed video.
Software malfunction: Similarly to hardware malfunction, artifacts may be caused by software issues such as bugs in the algorithms, such as decoding/encoding introducing artifacts into audio or video, or a poor pseudo-random number generator would introduce artifacts into statistical research models.
Compression: Controlled amounts of unwanted information may be generated as a result of the use of lossy compression techniques. One of such cases are the artifacts seen in JPEG and MPEG compression algorithms.
Aliasing: Digital imprecision generated in the process of converting analog information into digital space due to the limited granularity of digital numbering space. In computer graphics, aliasing is seen as pixelation.