Tweet-thread of the Day, Content Warning edition.

Check out this thread, if you dare. After the fold because, fair warning, this is some messed-up shit involving AI-generated imagery. And it will soon mutate into an urban legend with disquieting speed.

Straight-up. (Via @RobinDLaws)

4 thoughts on “Tweet-thread of the Day, Content Warning edition.”

  2. I think… it is not that surprising? The pictures that this person describes as resemblign loab often have very little to do with one another. I think it is more…
    – We, as a species, have generated a *lot* of images of human faces. “Human face” is going to be all over the place in the seed data that this drawing AI was grown from.
    – We, as a species, have really precise tolerances for what we think of as healthy and/or appealing human faces, especially as it starts to approach photorealistic, and our imagery reflects that. At the same time, those tolerances are… complicated. A baby, a high school athlete, and a deeply wrinkled grandmother can all look healthy, but that doesn’t mean they look similar.
    – Faces have a lot of complicated bits to play with.
    – We, as humans, are particularly aware of anything that looks like an *unhealthy* human face. That’s important information.

    So… basically, if you take a bunch of face images of very different people, and you average them together, and then munge them around a bit, it’s pretty easy to get the image of a face that looks kind of messed up – unhappy, unhealthy, or whatever – and people immediately latch on to that as important. The data concentration is such that you can average it into a great many things, and still retain enough singals that the brain connects “there’s a messed-up human face in there” and draws clear lines of connection between them.

    1. Oh yeah, a unified amalgamation of humanity into a single essence? That’s the Uncanny Valley from hell.

  3. There are actual humans whom my instincts declare to be unnatural abominations.

    Being polite to such persons, rather than jumping back and hitting them with a stick, is a major achievement of civilization.

Comments are closed.