Does AI also experience pareidolia, the phenomena characteristic of the human brain to see patterns where there are none?
In testing DenseCap, the recent image captioning algorithm developed at Stanford, we found that pareidolic images were rarely detected.
This suggests that there is a significant gap between how humans perceive the world and how we are building AI to perceive that same world.
Does AI see ghosts?
This is the Brown Lady of Raynham Hall in her most famous photograph, taken by Captain Hubert C. Provand and published in Country Life in 1936. The Brown Lady is purported to be the ghost of Lady Dorthy Walpole, who was imprisoned at Raynham hall until her death in 1726.
Ghostly appearances are thought to be caused by pareidolia, where the human brain sees a pattern when there isn't one. The human brain is especially predisposed to seeing human faces and silhouettes.
Would AI also be biased in the same way? To find out, we at Uncanny Learning wanted to see whether AI would also see a human figure in this well-known ghostly image. Using Stanford's DenseCap trained on the Visual Genome dataset, we looked to see if the AI would recognize this photograph as having a human likeness.
Unfortunately the spectral apparition was recognized as "A black and white car" and "a tree in the background".
It looks like our AI computer vision systems, at least in this case, was unmoved by the haunted apparition.
