I had thought that ‘pareidolia’ referred exclusively to the human
tendency to see human faces everywhere – any time you see two dots or
circles and a line below them, boom :) it’s a face. It can be triggered
by rocks, clouds, shadows, uneven browning on a tortilla or a
pancake.
It turns out, though, that pareidolia covers any kind of overactive
pattern matching. Humans look for meaningful patterns all the time,
without thinking about the search, and when something trips the right
thresholds in our brain, we seize upon it. The result can be faces,
voices, music or just a cloud that looks like a moose.
Here’s my thesis: the large language models (LLMs) and similar
generative software processes that people currently refer to as “AI” –
those are exceptionally well-tuned to produce patterns that will trigger
threshold recognition in human brains. Not by accident – that’s the
goal. They are pareidolia-circuit stimulators.
The problem is that LLM output is exactly as meaningful as any other
kind of pareidolia. Every well-formed paragraph is a false-positive
error.
And when people repeatedly mistake their overactive pattern
recognition for reality, we call that a mental disorder: psychosis.
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