How AI-Generated Images Are Like Dreams
After reading Tim Ferriss’ Four Hour Body over ten years ago, I was enthralled with the chapter on lucid dreaming. Imagine being able to unlock the power of dreams and sleeping to get a further advantage. Watch out Inception! After a few weeks of trying and getting to a point where I could recall dreams and figure out when I was in a dream state, I became too exhausted to continue and my dream of conquering lucid dreaming would have to wait for another day.
One of the ways to test for being in a dream state is to look at some text in your dream, look away, and then look back again. If you are dreaming, it is difficult to make out the text and it will change if you look back again.
This is why AI-generated images remind me of dreams. When I try to make out the text, I get the same feeling of confusion at trying to understand what’s written. The image for this post is an example. Everything seems real except for the text.
It could be that the way neural networks generate images mimics neurons in some fundamental way that we are yet to discover.
