Following a rabbit hole to see how far will it go ...what is "real"?

[Braineack]

Wow, those artificially-created human portraits do indeed look exceptionally real.

They do indeed. It reminds me of something a friend said back when I started working in computers. He said "if you set a computer to randomly populate pixels on a screen and left it for an infinite amount of time; at some point it will show a perfect image of Margaret Thatcher" I guess you can tell how long ago that was... I guess it wasn't so much of a joke

not at all.

 

[Tim Tucker 2]

Well, I think that the recognition of beauty and the response to it is a purely human trait so I wonder what the point and the outcome of removing the human touch from the creation of images actually is. Are they more imaginative, more real? Do they display a more fundamental understanding of a place, hold a more special memory?

The second point is that we are so sold on the idea of technology and how it creates images that we seem to think that it's a purely technical exersize involving logic and maths. It's actually driven by understanding the nature of optical illusion and how to fool the eye into thinking what it sees is real, which is much easier with the human face than any other object because we are so predisposed to recognise it and see it *correctly*, even when it's fundamentally flawed. How a human face should look is so imprinted in your memory that it's difficult to see past it, your brain corrects the flaws. Spot the obvious distortion:

 

[Designer]

You've got her eyes on upside-down.

 

[snowbear]

They do indeed. It reminds me of something a friend said back when I started working in computers. He said "if you set a computer to randomly populate pixels on a screen and left it for an infinite amount of time; at some point it will show a perfect image of Margaret Thatcher" I guess you can tell how long ago that was... I guess it wasn't so much of a joke

Give an infinite number of of rednecks an infinite number of shotguns and an infinite number of street signs, and they will reproduce all the great literary works in braille.