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[ashton1993]

Pareidoloop

The man in the moon and the face on mars. These are both the result of a psychological phenomenon known as pareidolia, which involves the brain trying to perceive random signals as significant. It’s one of the brain’s face detection mechanisms, and causes us to see faces where they don’t actually exist — the Virgin Mary’s face on toast, for example.

Programmer Phil McCarthy decided to play around with the idea of paredoila in artificial intelligence, and created a program called pareidoloop. It uses face detection algorithms to “see” human faces in randomly generated polygons.

The program is quite simple: it generates random polygons until the face detection algorithm (the kind cameras use to spot people in pictures) says that there’s a face in the image. This resulting image is then continuously mutated to constantly increase the face detections “confidence” (i.e. how certain it is that there’s a face in the image).

From the collage at the top of this post created by running the program for a few minutes, we can see that this system is pretty good at randomly generating patterns that look eerily like faces.

If you’re interested in playing around with the program yourself, the demo is online in the form of a simple web app.

[Loud Whispers]

Oh noes, now the AI's can recognize us D:

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The AI's don't^_officiallyexist. Though this could help AI development along some.

[Lectorog]

Oh noes, now the AI's can recognize us D:

Have you ever seen a camera with face recognition? I have one. It cost less than $100 three years ago, and the face recognition barely factored into the price. The technology still isn't perfect, but it's getting there.

This program is really neat. Like you said, the polygon generation is quite simple, with the face detection the only complex part of it, but it's interesting seeing the detection cycling through the various things that it considers to be or not to be human faces.

[Hanslanda]

Oh noes, now the AI's can recognize us D:

No, the AI can create reasonable facsimiles of human faces. Which is scarier, they know what we look like, or they can imitate what we look like with ease?

[darkrider2]

Oh noes, now the AI's can recognize us D:

No, the AI can create reasonable facsimiles of human faces. Which is scarier, they know what we look like, or they can imitate what we look like with ease?

Well great, now my army of killer robots will be way too busy finding pictures of jesus in soup bowls to bother taking over the world.

[kingfisher1112]

Oh shit oh shit oh shit...
Clever bot is a learning talking AI...
And now this provides the face...
I predict DARPA will make an evolving combat AI...
Then we're screwed.

[Lectorog]

Oh shit oh shit oh shit...
Clever bot is a learning talking AI...

... which is extremely primitive.

And now this provides the face...

... which human beings see a face in but easily recognize as nothing near a human.

I predict DARPA will make an evolving combat AI...

... if they want to; in fact, there are probably several very good ones that may or may not be in use currently.

Then we're screwed.

If the AI wanted you dead, you'd be dead already. You severely underestimate our progress. There is probably AI in your car (though not the human-level AI you're thinking of).

[kingfisher1112]

The Internet's ability to convey speech patterns annoys me. If you think that I was being serious, I've said crazy shit waaaay beyond what I just said. Lighten up, I wasn't being serious.

[EveryZig]

Soon computers will be better at recognizing faces than I am :/

[DrPoo]

Oh well, this is nice. Would help for random NPC generation in open world sanbox games, no seriously. Would be nice.

Also how do i get large images from the thing?

[Lectorog]

Also how do i get large images from the thing?

Change the output size. 200 is a nice large size. The number is the measure of a side, with the default 50, so 100 is going to be 4 times larger.

Would help for random NPC generation in open world sanbox games, no seriously. Would be nice.

I prefer the way it is now. A set of features that are randomized. It's not like you need to design each face from scratch. That's like if Mr. Potato Head came with unformed clay instead of plastic pieces.

[DrPoo]

Still, i just tried to find a use for this awesomeness.

[Loud Whispers]

Oh noes, now the AI's can recognize us D:

No, the AI can create reasonable facsimiles of human faces. Which is scarier, they know what we look like, or they can imitate what we look like with ease?

Well great, now my army of killer robots will be way too busy finding pictures of jesus in soup bowls to bother taking over the world.

And so the greatest defense against skynet was a Jesus potato.