[nartz]

I'm not sure you are interpreting this correctly - its not like they were torturing the monkey.

This is almost the same as studies where they show humans a set of images and ask them which they like the most. Except in this case, they just show them the images and try to measure it.

Most of these comments are blowing this out of proportion.

[crishoj]

Subjecting a being to a machine which automatically evolves stimuli to maximise fear response is not torture?

[gipp]

It's not maximizing "fear response", I'm not sure where everyone in this thread is getting that from. It's maximizing the response of particular visual cortex neurons, in structures where they're shown to be recognizers of specific shapes or concepts.

I.e. it's evolving images that this neuron thinks look most like a monkey, or a person. It's not the only neuron making that judgment, and it's all super nonlinear, so ofc it looks strange and distorted.

It's literally just doing this but with a real neuron instead of a virtual one: http://yosinski.com/deepvis

[nartz]

Things are relative here - you know they test experimental pharmaceutical drugs on monkeys too right?