[HN Gopher] Seeing Faces in Things: A model and dataset for pare...
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Seeing Faces in Things: A model and dataset for pareidolia
Author : rbanffy
Score : 53 points
Date : 2024-10-06 11:37 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| as a potential step up from overly sensitive pattern matching:
| somewhere I ran across the idea that our close primate relatives
| enjoy sleight-of-hand magic tricks, but more distant ones do not.
| frereubu wrote:
| There's an area of the brain called the fusiform face area which,
| despite its name, may actually be an area that's involved in
| visual expertise rather than faces per se:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusiform_face_area
|
| This is interesting in that I imagine this is similar to visual
| expertise rather than faces as such - I presume you could train a
| model to see areas of images as birds in the same way.
|
| Trying to suggest a serious link between the two is a bit
| ridiculous - rather like the idea that plants which look like
| dogs can heal dog bites (which is itself a form of over-
| recognition!) - but I find the parallel curious.
| donatj wrote:
| Just the other day I was at the Mille Lacs Indian Museum in
| Northern Minnesota. It has a really beautiful and well put
| together feature showing a collection of full sized Wigwams
| across the seasons.
|
| One of the wigwams for the Winter season had a very large piece
| of birch bark with a very obvious face in it. It was so obvious
| that I thought it had to be some sort of Easter egg by the
| museum.
|
| Pointing it out to my wife however, she couldn't seem to see it.
| She was like "maybe it looks like a face if I really try". Brain
| really plays tricks.
| Sophira wrote:
| This sounds a little like it might be related to how adversarial
| images work, because it sounds like the same kind of idea - you
| trick an image classifier into believing that it sees something
| that isn't really there.
|
| In a way, I guess pareidolia is just our version of adversarial
| images - It's just that we ascribe more obvious things (things
| that look like eyes, noses, mouths, etc) to the reason why we see
| faces, whereas I imagine an image classifier just happens to see
| random pixels that are the same or something like that.
| xrd wrote:
| This is exactly what CNNs do. Recognize patterns in transferrable
| areas of images. Once that feature map is generated, successive
| layers just look for the same patterns. We see patterns in faces,
| and so does AI if it uses a CNN or CNN-like model.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| But does the "AI" realise these aren't real faces?
| tkahds wrote:
| Next series: You should take probiotics for your gut bacteria and
| so should AI (sponsored by nature.com and Yakult[tm]).
|
| What is even science-worthy about this? If you can see a face in
| a cartoon drawn with a few lines, then those lines may appear in
| a cloud, stone, whatever. News at 11.
| swayvil wrote:
| I imagine faces on the fronts of people's heads. I know that this
| is common. Is this a consensual hallucination?
| tkgally wrote:
| I remember reading somewhere, maybe in an essay by John Updike,
| that Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock, who aimed to
| produce purely nonrepresentational paintings, had to be careful
| that face-like figures did not appear in their works
| unintentionally. They wanted to create art that had aesthetic
| value without recognizable images, and the effect they were
| seeking would be destroyed by an accidental smiley face or two
| among the vigorous brush strokes and dripped paint.
| card_zero wrote:
| That's happened to me with ordinary landscapes sometimes.
| Viewers: "there's a face in the clouds". _Shit._
| notnaut wrote:
| The number of mountains named for the shape of a lady
| indicates plenty of us get confused like this all the time!
| ;)
| ano-ther wrote:
| A friend in primary school used that to create comic faces:
| doodle randomly, find a face in the tangle and perfect it.
| Usually they were profiles with large noses and other
| exaggerations. Quite entertaining.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| This annoyingly persists in one of the first of a series of my
| large format plaster paintings
|
| My youngest daughter loves it so, I'm stuck with it luckily
| card_zero wrote:
| Huh, an image search for "plaster painting" turns up lots of
| people doing basically stucco bas-relief, like back in
| antiquity. I had no idea this was trendy.
| Garlef wrote:
| I use midjourney to create images inspired by abstract art and
| I usually add '--no person' for this very reason.
|
| (I wanted to avoid the phrase 'create abstract art' since I
| don't want to claim that it actually is art (at least I
| wouldn't want to claim so here on HN))
| 0points wrote:
| Claim away, but in no universe is it your art.
| ryanjshaw wrote:
| Says who?
| tashi wrote:
| That reminds me of the difficult constraint they must have had
| in making art and architecture for the game The Witness:
| nothing could ever accidentally seem to be, from any viewing
| place, one of the world's simplest shapes. Only by design.
| ww520 wrote:
| A large part of the brain is used for face recognition. There are
| dozens of regions each dedicated to process one feature of the
| face. The brain is also a generation machine. With only a few
| features recognized the brain can generate the rest of the face
| features, thus recognizing it as a face.
|
| With generative AI, it works the same way.
| challenger-derp wrote:
| There's a related line of research that concerns computer vision
| models and optical illusions.
| bcks wrote:
| Back in 2018, I ran a little test to see if I could push Google
| Cloud Vision to recognize objects, shapes, or patterns in clouds.
| No matter how I treated the images ahead of time, the answer
| always came back: clouds.
|
| Would be interesting to see how much free-association and
| hallucination have "improved" the results with the current
| generation.
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| I think it highly depends on the technique.
|
| The image recognition of google at 2018 most certainly was
| trained on a database of labelled images, and I would bet that
| the labels should have been short and distinct, not "a cloud
| with a vague representation of Bruce Willis' face" !
| a_t48 wrote:
| Your problem was right there in the name - google "cloud"
| vision.
| elif wrote:
| I wonder how much further along we will get creating human-like
| intelligences until Occam's razor suggests that the (in
| evolutionary scale) sudden emergence of human intelligence
| ~20,000 years ago was the result of the efforts of an intelligent
| force
| Carrok wrote:
| I'm not sure you understand Occam's Razor. What you are
| proposing is absolutely not the simplest explanation.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Why not? Whatever your bayesian priors are, they certainly
| don't match mine.
| Carrok wrote:
| Please provide a simpler explanation than "species begins
| eating calorically dense food, increasing brain size, and
| becoming smarter". Your supposedly simpler explanation must
| involve an unknown outside intelligence of some kind. I'll
| wait.
| iwontberude wrote:
| Because it begs the question, do you have intelligent
| beings designing intelligent beings all the way down? An
| infinite regression of writers writing writers?
| claysmithr wrote:
| No, you just have one God who created everything and has
| always existed.
| iwontberude wrote:
| This is one of the biggest mistakes in reasoning people make,
| they come up with fantastic explanations that require fantastic
| explanations, solving nothing. People like you are really
| INTERESTING.
| GrantMoyer wrote:
| Human intelligence arose slowly, over multiple species
| adaptions, and much longer ago than 20,000 years. For example,
| cooking predates modern humans[1] by at least hundreds of
| thousands of years.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooking#History
| uoaei wrote:
| pareidoilia are a natural side effect of any pattern recognition
| machine
| devmor wrote:
| One half of the entire basis of modern machine learning is
| creating algorithms capable of reaching the pattern recognition
| levels of humans.
|
| This is a given.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| I used to be so good at this. Then I started smoking cannabis.
| Then I became ultra good at this. Stains on walls became
| unbelievable works of art. I miss those days. I also use to hear
| symphonies in my brain as I'd fall asleep. Crazy, except it was
| beautiful
| carlmr wrote:
| It sounds like it was temporary. Did you stop? Did it stop
| working? What happened?
| [deleted]
| smusamashah wrote:
| I must link https://www.reddit.com/r/Pareidolia/ for anyone who
| likes findings faces in random places. There was another sub
| about things we see in clouds, can't find it.
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