Trippy images were designed by AI to super-stimulate monkey neurons (opens in new tab)

JFC. This thing is a monkey nightmare machine.

https://3c1703fe8d.site.internapcdn.net/newman/gfx/news/hire...

For sure, those are very likely images of fear. If you wanna call them “highly stimulating” well... That’s probably not untrue.

But the only thing that the monkey is likely finding “stimulating” about familiar people in surgical masks is an association with pain and terror. Note the odd expressionless faces standing over them, holding utensils.

Pretty god damned ominous. Not at all images one might call fun.

> To find out which sights specific neurons in monkeys "like" best, researchers designed an algorithm, called XDREAM, that generated images that made neurons fire more than any natural images the researchers tested.

I know they put "like" in quotes, but damn. Imagine this from a scifi angle:

> "The aliens from Tau Ceti found which stimuli specific humans "like" best by trying them out and seeing which ones made humans scream the most.

Remember when it was becoming increasingly difficult to tell the difference between real headlines and Onion headlines? Well, now it's becoming harder to tell the difference between reality and SCP Foundation logs.

I was afraid of this when I saw the headline, because it means we are finally at risk developing a Parrot attack. If it’s not apparent yet why digital displays need anti-seizure filters in hardware before it’s too late for humankind, read this and be very afraid:

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm

This is sick. I can't believe as human beings we still do this to other conscious creatures with feelings. It's emotionally traumatizing.

It's wrong.

How do all the commenters here know that the images are eliciting a fear response? The referenced study measures firing rates of visual neurons. It does not discuss ultimate emotional reactions.

This paper pretty closely resembles one that I saw a few months ago: Neural Population Control via Deep Image Synthesis: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/461525v1, which is included among the first few references. They do quite a bit of building off of it, but some of the images in the full paper are definitely as uncanny to look at as the ones included in the article about it above.

I wonder how this technique could be used to develop specific-person optimized user interfaces. Of course, it’ll probably be first used in ad-tech.

Why was this study done on monkeys instead of apes (closer to humans) or mice (cheaper)?

I wonder if there are more 'universal' images that would be able to have the same effect across populations?

I could imagine this type of thing going in art galleries, evoking different tailored emotions.

I find this both disturbing and fascinating from the perspective that this is essentially an attempt at developing a saliency map of a living organism... so instead of XAI it would be XI?