

Explanation for nightmare computer-generated picture haunting Reddit - rshrsh
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/this-mystery-photo-haunting-reddit-appears-to-be-image-recognition-gone-very-weird

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joezydeco
More/earlier HN discussion here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9736598](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9736598)

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westoncb
This is really awesome.

I'd been thinking for a while about how dreams in the brain might work, and
ended up thinking that they use a person's total schema set (beliefs, on a
everything) as a sort of grammar for parsing sensory information. Well,
anything that can recognize can also be used to generate: when we dream, it
could be that our brains are using this 'grammar' in a way that's opposite of
parsing, to produce partially random, but structurally coherent, content.

I actually started designing a language to do this (but you define the
'schemas' explicitly, instead of inferring them with a nueral net), but am
still working on a debugger I felt I needed in order to build the runtime
([http://symbolflux.com/projects/avd](http://symbolflux.com/projects/avd)).

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bla2
An album with a few more pictures and a video:
[https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPX0SCl7OzWilt9LnuQliat...](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPX0SCl7OzWilt9LnuQliattX4OUCj_8EP65_cTVnBmS1jnYgsGQAieQUc1VQWdgQ?key=aVBxWjhwSzg2RjJWLWRuVFBBZEN1d205bUdEMnhB)

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fr0styMatt2
I find many of these photos anxiety-provoking to look at. I can't explain why
though. Anyone got any ideas? It's almost like I find them 'odd' but to a
really really extreme degree.

This fascinates me. I wonder what provokes that reaction as I know that it's
totally irrational.

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userbinator
In the previous discussion someone mentioned that these images had a similar
effect to those that induce trypophobia (fear of holes) and I hypothesised
that it's basically because they contain far more edges and more variations of
them than we usually see, causing somewhat of a sensory overload by
stimulating an unusually large number of neurons.

I don't feel anxiety in particular, but it certainly feels like my brain is
working much harder when I look at them.

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Mahn
Actual reddit thread, because for some strange reason the article failed to
link to it:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/creepy/comments/39c6ta/](http://www.reddit.com/r/creepy/comments/39c6ta/)

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rhizome
_for some strange reason_

OP rshrsh is evidently an Atlas Obscura promoter.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=rshrsh](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=rshrsh)

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Facemelters
These photos are absolutely terrifying. Remind me never to be a computer.

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bhauer
Really? I think some of them are actually quite appealing, in particular the
last several. I wouldn't frame them as art in my house, but terrifying isn't
where my mind goes.

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DennisP
I could see hanging "How an early neural layer thinks about these addaxes."

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pcl
Yeah. That one is really quite something.

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leereeves
Ok...who gave the computers LSD?

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girvo
I think it's more DMT than LSD in this case

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bbrian
The observation is as valid. I've never taken DMT to comment in that respect,
but I very much concur with leereeves's LSD association. The fact is our
brains see something similar when on the drug. This is amazing.

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saganus
This is so cool.

And just going a little overboard:

What if in some years they manage to create some Jump "scenery" from Google
Brain data? The progression from this would be to make videos, and then
Jump... no?

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vmorgulis
Same kind of stuff but with robots:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Rv3vckAlO0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Rv3vckAlO0)

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deegles
I would love a slideshow of these as a screensaver.

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dlhavema
I think these are really cool looking, i especially like the man-dog on the
dog-horse-thing

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superobserver
A perfect example of "creativity" in action.

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ddmf
C20H25N3O / C12H17N2O4P

