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by TheGrumpyBrit 3496 days ago
Humans have a bit of an advantage on two levels here. First, we know what a cat looks like. Not a video or a picture or a drawing, but an actual cat. That gives us a solid frame of reference. "That is definitely a cat. That drawing looks kind of like what I know a cat to look like, so it's a drawing of a cat." The closest a computer can get is "This drawing has quite a bit in common with these other drawings, and apparently these other drawings are cats. So this is probably a cat too."

Second, when we look at a picture of a cat, we're looking at a human's interpretation of what a cat looks like. If we asked a computer to draw a cat, it might look nothing like a cat to us, but another computer could look at it and go "Oh sure, that's a cat." I seem to recall Google did a thing with this a while ago, where they effectively created a feedback loop in a neural net - feeding its own drawing back into itself. As I recall, the result looked like the computer had done way too much LSD.