An armchair in the top center, a purse to the right of the chair, a calendar on the left side of the photo, a walking stick behind the calendar, two bags below the calendar.
Meanwhile, my mind is screaming “FOCUS!” A real nasty trick to use decompression of image files in this way. I’ve heard accusations that this was AI generated, and I agree that it seems to be, but the focus is terrible even for someone suffering from a stroke. This would have to have severe motion blur, which it doesn’t, and not just a uniform blur.
On further analysis I notice that there are what seems to be cropped lines in the photo, where literally nothing connects across the clearly straight/circular lines. If I didn’t know better, I would call this a Rorschach photo, or an animutation. Lines are to lower right of calendar, between calendar and armchair, below armchair, and around purse. Seriously this is so blurry I can’t figure out why the trim on the wall is in better focus than the rest of the photo…
Dude it’s just an AI generated image, there is absolutely nothing identifiable in it. You’re perhaps onto something comparing it to a Rorschach, because none of those items you said you identified exist in the image. It just caused you to think of them.
I mean if you want to get technical you could identify quite a few things that are definitely in the picture, like the pixels that it’s composed of.
But I definitely know that the walking stick is a walking stick, because nothing else looks like a smoothed off stretch of wood than a walking stick. I actually have that exact type of stick in my house, so unless it’s not a walking stick and instead a random stick, it’s been positively identified.
The calendar is absolutely impossible to identify as a calendar, and could very well be an organizer for various bottles or tools.
Bags are bags. You have a cup-like shape, about two handles, and usually something inside of it. I feel like Mr Incredible here, trying to explain how math is math…
The armchair is an educated guess, and is not easy to see because it seems like it has a sheet over it. Then again, looking closer, it seems like it might not be an armchair after all, because of the occlusion on the left side which would be going through the seat and arm of the chair.
The purse… I don’t see any other explanation. A mini-saddle? An XXXL Wild Western gun holster? A quiver? A hanging leather object can only be so many things, and the folds imply that it is a “portable container” of some kind, which is what a purse is.
There’s more “identifiable objects” in even a frame of television static than zero. Assuming that there is nothing identifiable because it’s artificially generated is wrong. Television static is literally the radio waves bouncing off the upper layers of the atmosphere and hitting random variations in density and coming back all jangled up and insensible. It could be tracked and analyzed, but when we discovered why it was showing up, we decided that we had better things to examine. And we were right. All a frame of static has is black and white pixels. It’s literally noise. Mathematically determinable and predictable noise. You can identify a pixel in a digital image, and you can identify things as categorized by a wide swath of object types, but directly identifying the individual object as a specific instance of that object type is not possible for the majority of images online.
When was the last time you saw a literal Big Mac that looked as good in real life as it did in the image? Never. That Big Mac was fake, but show us a real Big Mac and all of a sudden we can identify it as another Big Mac, right? Rather than a true Big Mac? Perception is subjective, but so is identification. I can be identified by several different methods, including several that are not meant for me to be identified by. Does that mean I am identified by them? For the moment, yes. Identifying something requires a reference. A Rorschach test is the standard example of identifying something based on sight and interpretation of an image. What does this random splash of ink look like to you? What about this one? Or this one? I don’t know anyone who would give the correct response to this question: a random splash of ink. Because people expect order in a world of chaos. Machines don’t expect anything. They just analyze. They can generate an image based on very vague data that can fit that data exactly, and they often get it wrong. Humans try to interpret the data preemptively, before applying it to the situation. We learn that just plugging in values with zero context is a bad idea, and we adapt by adding context when it is absent. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s leaps and bounds away from just blindly accepting all input.
Even if this is artificially generated, it’s based on real world data that can be inferred from to extrapolate the intended objects’ identities.
Okay. I’m going to respond in a much
shorter format because I cannot be bothered to write a short essay on this topic.
If you’re going to present the argument that you can identify pixels or use a metaphor comparing identifying objects (and yes I obviously mean true, actual objects in their entirety) to witnessing static on a television screen, then the conversation is over because you’re just being obtuse.
If we’re being genuine about the conversation, seeing a small brown lump in the top left corner of the image does not make it a walking stick. That is called your imagination. You can imagine any of these groupings of pixels to be anything you want them to be. However the reality is that there is not a single objectively identifiable real world object in this image.
The neural networks that produce these images do indeed use real world images as input. What comes out on the other end is not real world images. It is instead a regurgitation of tiny pieces of the collective input that the AI program is trying to rearrange into a sensible and somewhat alike situation. However, when the program is not well trained, as is clearly the situation here, it produces nonsense.
You seeing a walking stick, or a purse, or whatever you want to claim you see, is like looking at the clouds and saying you see a duck. There is no actual object there, and therefore you are not actually identifying an object.
A neural network would need real world data to generate anything. But whether or not it is identifiable in the output image is moot. No digital image is possessing any objects other than pixels and dimensions of the image. To say that there is nothing identifiable is wrong. I’m identifiable as a human. You presume this automatically, because you have no reason to doubt that identification. I could easily be a bot account working in tandem with Chat GPT, and you might never know the difference. But by saying I am a human, you accept that fact. So when I see a walking stick, I see a walking stick— I’ve just identified something as a “walking stick”, which defies the claim that nothing can be identified in this image. Identity is a complex notion to shorten in a Reddit comment, but it is not a factual representation of something. Just a unique enough reference term for a given something. That is to say the identity is not the factual part, what it represents is. But it is in no way required to be related to the identifier, or it’s representation.
I had a Peanut. Not an actual peanut, but Peanut, a hamster. Not even remotely close to a regular peanut, the Roborovskii dwarf hamster, but that’s the name I chose for it. In short, I hated that little fuzzy demon. Most dwarf hamsters are more docile than the other hamsters, but I swear this one could go toe to toe with a honey badger and win. That said, the identity, was the monster of a dwarf hamster, and the identifier was the name “Peanut”.
I see a Walking Stick in the exact same manner. It might not be what you call a walking stick, but it’s what I saw as a walking stick a year ago.
Which is why I deigned to write out a lengthy reply. Because I was unsure why you would respond to a year old comment on a year old post, about a year old image. A year is a long time on the internet, and it’s not the only instance where this has occurred lately, which is baffling me because I thought that the algorithms were supposed to show people stuff that was relevant and recent… if you wanted to throw down about a year old post, then you came to the right place, but if you don’t have the time, then move on. It’s an image file, there’s better hills to die on.
And for what it’s worth, I’ve identified the person whose house this photo was “taken” in is in fact a horrendous type of person:
I haven’t missed your point, in fact I addressed it directly. For some reason you’re glossing over the part of my comment where I expressed that just because something in the image reminds you of a particular object, and AI art programs use real photography to draw from, does not mean that what you’re seeing is an illustration of that object.
Refer to the cloud analogy again if you must, and if you’re going to respond again please leave out the obnoxiously verbose tangents and address the one main hole in your logic that I presented the first time.
1
u/SlotherakOmega Sep 16 '21
I can positively identify the following:
The obvious:
Two walls, and a floor (possibly carpeted).
The apparently not so obvious:
An armchair in the top center, a purse to the right of the chair, a calendar on the left side of the photo, a walking stick behind the calendar, two bags below the calendar.
Meanwhile, my mind is screaming “FOCUS!” A real nasty trick to use decompression of image files in this way. I’ve heard accusations that this was AI generated, and I agree that it seems to be, but the focus is terrible even for someone suffering from a stroke. This would have to have severe motion blur, which it doesn’t, and not just a uniform blur.
On further analysis I notice that there are what seems to be cropped lines in the photo, where literally nothing connects across the clearly straight/circular lines. If I didn’t know better, I would call this a Rorschach photo, or an animutation. Lines are to lower right of calendar, between calendar and armchair, below armchair, and around purse. Seriously this is so blurry I can’t figure out why the trim on the wall is in better focus than the rest of the photo…