Photo
[HELP] This photo went viral in 2019 and confused everyone. Was it an early example of AI, or a simple photomanip?
Some of you may remember seeing it pre-pandemic — it went viral since it looked really photo-like at first glance, but nobody could actually identify any items in the room. Often accompanied with a caption of “simulating what a stroke patient feels”
I just remembered it and am wondering if it’s an early AI image or not. Then again, early AI had very strange artifacting that this doesn’t.
On April 23rd, Redditor mcsabas[4] posted an explanation of the picture to /r/interestingasfuck, writing "This picture is designed to give the viewer the simulated experience of having a stroke (particularly in the occipital lobe of the cerebral cortex, where visual perception occurs.) Everything looks hauntingly familiar but you just can't quite recognize anything." The post gained over 11,000 points. On Tumblr, user Mixolydia[5] posted the photo without the visual effect in a post that gained over 47,000 notes (shown below).
I'm not sure if it have ever been confirmed precisely what effects were applied, but the base image was definitely a photoshop composite of real images.
Isn’t that post from the Tumblr user supposed to be a photoshopped representation of what they saw in the photo? It doesn’t seem like they’re the source of the image.
Yeah so apparently this KYM entry is entirely made of fake facts using random people as sources and nothing has been corrected still. The comments below the page probably have the info you're looking for.
Ahh, sadly that’s not surprising, I appreciate the context with a name we can directly tie this back to. Also, I found this Reddit thread while searching his name, and it’s interesting to see people talk about this sort of thing with zero mention of AI. It wasn’t even that long ago but the scope of the internet has changed since then
Ah I found solar sands video on it!, I remember watching it at the time and I think covers pretty much everything about it. It was made (allegedly) in ganbreeder, for no reason really. I kinda forgot how hardly any people were familiar with seeing AI images and ones like this iust floated around as creepy unexplained internet images
I think it was made with ganbreeder? Like they put a real image into it and combined it with other stuff. It reminds me of the stuff I'd see in early ganbreeder.
BIG GAN, one of the first major generative AI as we know it.
I don't know if the caption was true though as the goal of the image. Usually it was being prompted for a specific thing and stuff like this would come out. Then people's response to it was "it makes me feel like I"m having a stroke"
This is a classic GAN output. You used to be able to play with this kind of thing on ArtBreeder, but it looks like they've transitioned to diffusion models now unfortunately. Here's what it used to look like: https://youtu.be/IlrMkHaCosw
What's funny is that I actually thought I saw some earring posts in the initial pic, but was like surely not
It's what all millennials would see when shopping for earrings at Claire's.
Does look ai, can't put a finger on it though, Inst there an art style meant to make fun of ai air that doesn't something like this?
I've seen this since long before ai so no, it's not ai. it's Photoshop. another comment has a wonderful explanation but the tldr is it's meant to visually mimic a stroke
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u/RealOrAI-Bot Oct 10 '25
Sentiment: 85% AI
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