
Trippy images were designed by AI to super-stimulate monkey neurons - amatus
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-05-trippy-images-ai-super-stimulate-monkey.html
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monkeyHELL
JFC. This thing is a monkey nightmare machine.

[https://3c1703fe8d.site.internapcdn.net/newman/gfx/news/hire...](https://3c1703fe8d.site.internapcdn.net/newman/gfx/news/hires/2019/2-thesetrippyi.jpg)

For sure, those are very likely images of fear. If you wanna call them “highly
stimulating” well... That’s probably not untrue.

But the only thing that the monkey is likely finding “stimulating” about
familiar people in surgical masks is an association with pain and terror. Note
the odd expressionless faces standing over them, holding utensils.

Pretty god damned ominous. Not at all images one might call fun.

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Darkphibre
You seem to be anthropomorphizing the neuron. This work is pretty innovative:
We've used this technique to generate similar images of computer neural
networks to try to figure out what a given neuron or layer is actually
learning: [http://yosinski.com/deepvis](http://yosinski.com/deepvis)

Now, we're monitoring a _biological_ neuron with the same technique, and
_coming up with similar feature selection_. That both validates the approach
we've been taking with deep neural networks, AND it provides us heretofore-
unimaginable access to individual neuronal activation materials.

Exciting stuff!

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BoiledCabbage
> You seem to be anthropomorphizing the neuron.

And respectfully, you seem to be ignoring the fact that the neuron is part of
a living sentient creature.

That comment epitomizes the cliche of an engineer/scientist so excited by the
technology that they are completely blind to its real world implications.

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pavel_lishin
> _To find out which sights specific neurons in monkeys "like" best,
> researchers designed an algorithm, called XDREAM, that generated images that
> made neurons fire more than any natural images the researchers tested._

I know they put "like" in quotes, but damn. Imagine this from a scifi angle:

> _" The aliens from Tau Ceti found which stimuli specific humans "like" best
> by trying them out and seeing which ones made humans scream the most._

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ASalazarMX
Fortunately the brain has astounding plasticity. It it's only images, we would
get used to them.

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dwaltrip
Try telling that to those who do content review for YouTube, Facebook, etc.
People have suffered PTSD from jobs like that.

Saying it's just images isn't saying anything at all. Mental harm is just as
real as bodily harm, even if it is harder to examine.

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Eliezer
Remember when it was becoming increasingly difficult to tell the difference
between real headlines and Onion headlines? Well, now it's becoming harder to
tell the difference between reality and SCP Foundation logs.

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floatingatoll
I was afraid of this when I saw the headline, because it means we are finally
at risk developing a Parrot attack. If it’s not apparent yet why digital
displays need anti-seizure filters in hardware before it’s too late for
humankind, read this and be very afraid:

[http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm](http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm)

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anon1m0us
This is sick. I can't believe as human beings we still do this to other
conscious creatures with feelings. It's emotionally traumatizing.

It's wrong.

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nartz
I'm not sure you are interpreting this correctly - its not like they were
torturing the monkey.

This is almost the same as studies where they show humans a set of images and
ask them which they like the most. Except in this case, they just show them
the images and try to _measure_ it.

Most of these comments are blowing this out of proportion.

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crishoj
Subjecting a being to a machine which automatically evolves stimuli to
maximise fear response is not torture?

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gipp
It's not maximizing "fear response", I'm not sure where everyone in this
thread is getting that from. It's maximizing the response of particular visual
cortex neurons, in structures where they're shown to be recognizers of
specific shapes or concepts.

I.e. it's evolving images that this neuron thinks look most like a monkey, or
a person. It's not the only neuron making that judgment, and it's all super
nonlinear, so ofc it looks strange and distorted.

It's literally just doing this but with a real neuron instead of a virtual
one: [http://yosinski.com/deepvis](http://yosinski.com/deepvis)

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00117
How do all the commenters here know that the images are eliciting a fear
response? The referenced study measures firing rates of visual neurons. It
does not discuss ultimate emotional reactions.

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ve55
This paper pretty closely resembles one that I saw a few months ago: Neural
Population Control via Deep Image Synthesis:
[https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/461525v1](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/461525v1),
which is included among the first few references. They do quite a bit of
building off of it, but some of the images in the full paper are definitely as
uncanny to look at as the ones included in the article about it above.

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adolph
I wonder how this technique could be used to develop specific-person optimized
user interfaces. Of course, it’ll probably be first used in ad-tech.

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pavel_lishin
"I will buy whatever you're selling to make this stimulus stop, please."

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andai
_Resume viewing. Resume viewing._

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max76
Why was this study done on monkeys instead of apes (closer to humans) or mice
(cheaper)?

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nartz
I wonder if there are more 'universal' images that would be able to have the
same effect across populations?

I could imagine this type of thing going in art galleries, evoking different
tailored emotions.

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kadoban
That would be an interesting application. I assume first we'll see it used in
advertising though. More money and looser morals there.

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bluejay2387
I find this both disturbing and fascinating from the perspective that this is
essentially an attempt at developing a saliency map of a living organism... so
instead of XAI it would be XI?

