Explanation for nightmare computer-generated picture haunting Reddit | Hacker News Reader

Explanation for nightmare computer-generated picture haunting Reddit

atlasobscura.com

68 pointsrshrsh23 comments

More/earlier HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9736598

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).

An album with a few more pictures and a video: https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPX0SCl7OzWilt9LnuQliat...

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.

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.

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

for some strange reason

OP rshrsh is evidently an Atlas Obscura promoter.

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=rshrsh

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

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.

Imagine your world being constructed as such though

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

Yeah. That one is really quite something.

Many of these are beautiful - I would love a high-resolution poster of the first one or the cloud-animals.

> Remind me never to be a computer.

It's way to late for that, you already are. And people do in fact do this kind of "reverse recognition", both when they dream, and even when they're awake and let their fantasies roam freely for a little.

It's the price you pay for being a pattern recognizer: nightmares, day dreams, and art.

Ok...who gave the computers LSD?

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

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.

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?

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

I would love a slideshow of these as a screensaver.

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

A perfect example of "creativity" in action.

C20H25N3O / C12H17N2O4P

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