Earlier this week a bizarre image went viral , after baffled viewers were unable to distinguish any objects in it.
The strange image was shared on Twitter on Tuesday, and has since garnered over 31,000 retweets and 75,000 likes.
While the items in the image remain a mystery, experts have now revealed why it’s so disconcerting to look at.
Speaking to Live Science , Dr Steven Schlozman, a psychiatry expert at Harvard Medical School , explained that the creepiness is the result of our brains trying to process the image.
He said: “I think the creepiness comes from our brains' attempts at recognising a pattern, zeroing in on that pattern, and then having the expected pattern continually disrupted by another recognisable pattern.
"I swear I see a chimp in that photo. But then it becomes something else, and then something else.
“I can't complete the puzzle. I can get some of it, but never enough to know what I'm seeing."
Experts believe that the photo was likely generated by artificial intelligence , and that the objects aren’t actually real.
Speaking to Live Science, Janelle Shane, an electrical engineer who regularly uses AI systems, suggested that a neural network called BigGAN had been used.
She explained: "This kind of neural net, called a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), learns to generate images from thousands of example photos.
"It was trained to generate about 1,000 distinct categories of images, but a fun thing about GANs is that you can also ask them to generate images that are a mix of categories."
However, the source of the image remains unclear – and it's still creeping us out!
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