On Alien Recognition
“What does an ant see when it looks at your face? I didn’t know. I thought about ants because a bug’s perspective seemed like the most alien thing I could imagine. I didn’t understand then that the machine behind the eye of that camera is much more alien than an ant. Scientists know a lot of things about insect optical processing. But no one knows what artificial intelligence sees when it looks at a picture of your face. The large language models that programmers train to identify faces are black boxes. Even the engineers don’t know how or in what form your face appears to the system. All they know is that AI likes your face to be brightly lit. And that it prefers for you not to smile.”
Michael Clune - https://harpers.org/archive/2025/08/your-face-tomorrow-michael-clune-ai-facial-recognition. This an interesting summary of AI limits to facial recognition. Whenever I read someone compare AI to alien intelligence it reminds me of Weizenbaum’s similar in sight in his 1976 Computer Power and Human Reason. This week I was discussing with students in class some recent limits in AI technology. One of the students uploaded Picasso’s Guernica to test image reconition software we gave them to play with online. It demonstrated clearly how much the technologies can’t ‘recognize’ and even direct comparisons of the same face typically only share 80% confidence. Nonetheless, when asked if they’d prefer a doctor’s diagnosis alone, or an AI diagnosis alone, or a combination of both, the majority opted for the latter. What’s interesting is how best to model such collaborations. To address this challenge we’re comparing models of AI with more sophisticated accounts of human cognition. For instance, last week outlined human excellence at the frame problem in light of Dreyfus’s model of skill in What Computers Still Can’t Do. That was context to compare with computer science summaries of how AI technologies work. The course is unique in that it includes computer science, mathematics and philosophy academics all presenting and discussing these matters together with students each week.
