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by monkeyHELL 2608 days ago
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.

2 comments

You seem to be anthropomorphizing the neuron. This work is pretty innovative: We've used this technique to generate similar images of computer neural networks to try to figure out what a given neuron or layer is actually learning: http://yosinski.com/deepvis

Now, we're monitoring a biological neuron with the same technique, and coming up with similar feature selection. That both validates the approach we've been taking with deep neural networks, AND it provides us heretofore-unimaginable access to individual neuronal activation materials.

Exciting stuff!

> You seem to be anthropomorphizing the neuron.

And respectfully, you seem to be ignoring the fact that the neuron is part of a living sentient creature.

That comment epitomizes the cliche of an engineer/scientist so excited by the technology that they are completely blind to its real world implications.

The images in this study were generated by a regular GAN, though. The biological neuron responses were only used to optimize the input parameters to the GAN. So I'm not sure if it really counts as independent feature selection.
What are the paper faces?
Facemasks?