AI models designed to create images from text descriptions can make optical illusions that look like different objects depending on how they are viewed.
at the University of Michigan and his colleagues made slight adaptions to an existing AI model to get it to make a range of illusions. Some appear to depict other things as you view them from further away; some become three different images depending on their rotation and others even appear as entirely different scenes when viewed still or with motion blur.
The research is based on a type of AI called a diffusion model. Like other AI models, this is trained using a large set of images, but in this case these images are then gradually and deliberately destroyed by adding noise to them. A pristine image has a layer of noise added that degrades it slightly, and then more noise is added, and so on, until the image is pure chaos.
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The AI watches this process and learns how to reverse it. It can then begin with an input that is nothing but noise and slowly – over hundreds of iterations – work towards an image that matches a text description that it is given.
Geng says the trick to using this method to generate illusions was running several of these processes in parallel on the same image, but focusing on different elements – their appearance at different distances, orientations or other aspects.
“We’d seen all these image-generation models making really amazing images, but I guess we were curious if they could do something maybe a bit more creative, and the thing we landed on was optical illusions,” says Geng. “We thought it’d be a fun project. But I guess the other side is that optical illusions are sort of like a way to understand how human perception, or visual perception, works – they’re kind of like the failure cases.”
Geng says the work could be used in animation or other art, or even help investigate the mechanisms involved in visual perception. But the most interesting application so far was by a computer scientist who discovered the work and used it to propose to his girlfriend with optical illusions.
arXiv
