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Does anyone know how this image was produced? Is it a filter of some kind applied over a real world image? Maybe could be done on a video?

This would be great for a Lovecraftian horror movie like Birdbox, when you want to give a glimpse of what indecipherable monster the characters are looking at just before they go crazy and kill themselves.

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I suspect it's been generated from the generator part of a GAN (Generative Adversarial Network); you get two ML algorithms - one to pick real from fake pictures (a classifier) and one to generate fake pictures (the generator) - and then pit them against each other. I wonder if this image is possibly a high quality generative example that the classifier failed to identify as 'fake'.

Also - the generator probably uses an autoencoder to generate the images, which might explain the 'how' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoencoder.

I hope that explanation wasn't too dull!

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