What do you see in the above picture? What do you think this is?

It looks like a duck from one side and looks like a rabbit from the other.

The rabbit–duck illusion is a famous ambiguous image with the earliest known version as an unattributed drawing from the 1892 issue of Fliegende Blätter, a German humor magazine.

Here is another one.

American cartoonist William Hill (1887–1962) published "My Wife and My Mother-in-Law" in Puck, an American humor magazine, in 1915, with the caption.

Well, they belong to a category of images known as ambiguous images also called reversible images that can fool us. They are visual forms that create ambiguity by exploiting graphical similarities and properties of our visual systems.

There is no one correct answer as both are true and depend on our perspective. It is just that we perceive only one at a time.

AI systems essentially are trained by humans. It may be shocking to some people but yes at the end of the day, they are trained by humans somewhere in some part of the world. Right from ChatGPT to Stable Diffusion and others, an enormous amount of outsourced human labor – has gone to bring these systems up and running so we can get instant answers and gratification with GPT while sipping coffee.

In essence current AI is a compressed statistical roulette of collective cognition of the human race.

Now the question is if I present this to one of the trained Imaging systems, what will I get? Depends on the training and who the trainers are. If the human trainers recognized this object as overwhelming as a duck in the first pic, it would be marked as a duck. If another trainer marked this as a rabbit it would be that.

AI systems run through a gamut of probability networks of computation backward and forward (hence the name Generative Pretrained Transformer) - by applying techniques of clustering to ascertain the classification. It is all a probabilistic model for inference. Now you know where all the Nvidia box horsepower goes into. Each of these is an energy guzzler, now tempting the Chinese authorities to supposedly build an AI data center under deep ocean with freezing temperatures thereby making it extremely energy efficient.

Now back to the duck story, it highlights a basic unsolvable mystery of nature that results in duality. For example, in a famous discipline of physics namely Quantum Mechanics, humans behave as particles sometimes and as waves other times. Come again! This is an unsettling feeling to think of humans that way, but we do. At the subatomic level, particles behave as waves giving famous experiments. At the macroscopic level, our wave nature is not subdued, and we are particles.

Think of another – the dark side of the moon. We cannot see the dark side of the moon due to the gravitational lock on the moon over centuries by Earth’s gravity. But it does exist. We just don’t see it. However, if you were on the other side, you would not see the side of the moon that we see from the Earth. But both exist. In the same way the duck and rabbit both exist – depends on where you are in observation.

Similar mysteries exist in Mathematics – made famous by Kurt Gödel, the famous German mathematician, who shook the world in the 1930s by publishing the “Incompleteness Theorem”, which says there are truths in formal axiomatic systems (simple English-logical systems that we all live under); that are TRUE but cannot be proven within the format system. Again, it exists, but we can’t see it, the same way we cannot see the dark side of the moon, as well as the duck and the rabbit at the same time.

So in conclusion, nature plays a lot of tricks on us. The duality issue is core to our existence and by construction inherited into all modern AI Systems - since it is the compression of our cognitive intelligence.

Another one of nature’s tricks for the road. Humans are symmetrical creatures. Our legs, feet, arms, hands, torso, face, ears, and eyes are all symmetrical around an imaginary center line running in our body from top to bottom. But the human heart is asymmetrically located more to the left than right. Go figure!

About the writer: Subrao Shenoy is CEO of planetRE that hosts a variety of Generative AI Solutions for Real Estate (Aelo.AI and chocolatechips.ai). He has run a successful proptech company for over a decade with experience of automating millions of transactions across the nation. He also owns seminal patents in CRM, Property Search, and Blockchain /AI .

Images sources - Wiki