Impossibly incredibly beautiful and eerie images created by google recognition software

I have no words. I would have called these things excellent, whimsical and somewhat spooky works by a talented human artist had I not read the explanation.

The basic idea is, they gave the recognition software cues concerning what to look for in an image–regardless of whether any such thing was in the image in the first place–and let it iterate the process several times until… well just look.

It even works on pure noise images.

It looks like nothing less than genuine dream images.

Do neural networks dream of electric sheep?

That might explain why people see faces in random stuff… their neural networks are freewheeling.

Artificial apophenia. Neat.

Those things are indeed stunningly beautiful, and insightful. I knew that neural nets sometimes have a tendency to confabulate, i.e. to find things that aren’t really there, but I had no idea that could give rise to such stunning imagery. And to think, those were incredibly simple networks—it’s not wonder that the human brain comes up with all sorts of faeries, demons, UFOs and whatnot: it’s what we’re trained to recognize. Thanks for the link!

EDIT: And people should definitely check out the photo gallery, there’s even more stuff there.

Yes it does, it’s a clear example of confirmation bias at work.
Which brings us to the horrid conclusion that the average future cybernetic overlords will be as impervious to logical reasoning as the average fleshie today.
Dystopian futures are not what they used to be. :frowning:

Well, that gallery just about sent LSD into obsolescence…

Beautiful. Thanks for linking it.

Cold, man. Cold.

OK, so if you feed that thing videos, it gets pretty weird. If you feed it Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, it gets… I don’t think there’s a word for that. :eek:

There’s an entire new Reddit forum of these images:

Whoa.

Also being discussed (with more example links) in this nearby thread.