Pareidolia

Pareidolia is the phenomena where humans see familiar patterns where none really exist. This has inspired stories, art and culture shared by humans for millennia. So I wondered, if humans are prone to see these figures, and we are creating AI to see as we see, what is AI prone to see?

Can an artificial mind see the man in the moon?

Three million years ago, one of your and my hominid ancestors picked up a brownish-red stone and carried it over 32 kilometers to their home. Why had our ancestor carried it for such a distance?

The key to solving the mystery was to understand a brain that was similar, yet still different from ours.

Adversarial Handwriting to fool an AI into thinking you got an A

I wanted to see if I could get an AI to experience pareidolia intentionally.

So, I went back to one of my first areas of interest - digit recognition - to see whether I could trick an AI into seeing every digit as an eight. The AI changed the digits in a way that was completely incomprehensible to humans - the AI was experiencing pareidolia that we are unable to see.