Photography and artificial intelligence: “I dreamed about a human being”

How would a robot imagine a human face? "I dreamed about a human being" is like spying into a robot's brain.

"I dreamed about a human being" is part of a project exploring the use of artificial intelligence as applied to photography by using online open source code and data. The project already has a database of 56 million images. We have freely accessible amazing tools and databases of gigantic images, but have not yet fully understood what we can do with them or what it means that they are there.

This series of images is the result of statistical calculations on 257 faces detected by an algorithm that has been taught to recognise portraits of a specific aesthetic quality. The search was conducted over 5 million images with Creative Commons licenses posted on Flickr. "Mean", the displayed image on the left, is the average of these 257 photographs, comprising 17 babies, 106 men, 79 women, 18 girls, 23 boys and 14 errors.

You can read the full article following this link.

Another way of viewing these accumulated images is by seeing them pass by at full speed and blurring your vision a little. You can see the same "average effect" by watching the following video, which has 2,582 images moving at a rate of 25 images per second: http://vimeo.com/49552899