AI: Subliminal Messages
A new level of embedded subliminal messages has arrived
Look at the image above. Some people walking on a street, dressed for a night out. Nothing too much out of the ordinary, right? Now make your eyes into little slits so you are looking through your eye lashes. Does the word pop out to you? If not try looking at the screen from a distance. There is a word in big letters.
This is done with a recently discovered technique, that as far as I know, doesn’t have a name yet. Using this technique artists (or whatever you want to call them) can embed patterns like words into images. The patterns don’t stand out if you’re looking at the picture normally, you have to look from far away or squint.
What is new about this technique is that the embedded pattern emerges from concrete elements in the picture. Traditional subliminal embeddings were done by mixing in a word faintly, or have it emerge from a seemingly random pattern.
The picture below is a clear illustration of how an abstract pattern can be embedded can be embedded into a figurative image.
The text prompt created the scenery and a four by four black and white tile pattern in an image was used to create the tile pattern.
How does this work? AI can generate images from text. It does this by analyzing millions of images and millions of words and then creating a shared semantic space, a space of meaning. Normally, to generate images, the text is the input and the images are the output. But, images can also be an input.
So here we have another amazing skill that is now within reach of anyone. Will you now be bombarded with subliminal messages on every website that you visit? Maybe, but do they really work? At the moment there is no clear answer to this question, but the availability of unlimited subliminal images should facilitate new research in this area. (Take a look at my post about the related subject of subliminal audio messages.)
When, as a young boy, I went along with my father Poppe Damave on one of his landscape painting trips, he always occasionally squinted. This is what painters do to get an overall view of a landscape, and how that matches the work in progress. I suspect squinting will become a lot more common in the near future among those who suspect there may be something hidden in the image…