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Comment by tobyhinloopen

3 years ago

The cats are too good to be generated.

I thought so too, so I tried to find out if they were scraped from the web. I saved about a dozen generated images and used Google Reverse Image Search and TinEye to see if I could find a match on the Internet. But no luck.

Maybe the cat images look so real as compared to generated human faces because our brain is tuned to recognize human faces and can perceive the tiniest flaws, but not so with cat faces.

I don't think my search proves anything however. With hundreds of millions of cat pictures on the web, I wonder if simple transformations on a real photo -- like flipping or slightly rotating the image, squishing it vertically or horizontally by 10%, adjusting the color -- would be enough to hide the original from Google or TinEye?

  • >Maybe the cat images look so real as compared to generated human faces because our brain is tuned to recognize human faces and can perceive the tiniest flaws, but not so with cat faces.

    Lucky for all of you, I spend way too much time staring at cats and while most of the ones generated here are pretty good, there's quite a few where the proportions are off and they look fake or edited to me. If I saw them outside of the context of being generated images, I'm very sure I'd still be staring at them trying to figure out what was wrong.

  • TinEye can certainly find different resolution (and aspect ratio?) versions of images, and somewhat cropped images. I'm not sure how much rotation it can handle, though.

I've seen a couple coat colors that don't seem right. There was one where the cat was dark blue with a very light blue around the muzzle extending up to a strip between the eyes. It was basically your normal white spotting, but it's not genetically possible to have pigmentation in that pattern (barring chimerism, of course).

There were also a couple questionable ones where they had very studdy cheeks, but were tricolor (calico, tortishell, patched tabby). They distinctly looked like intact males, but you need two x chromosomes to have a tricolor cat. Or chimerism, of course, which I've learned over the years makes it impossible to ever say a specific pattern isn't possible.

It did get me wondering though, with the fact that most apparently male cats with tricolor markings genetically have an extra X chromosome, whether they would still get the big stud cheeks. I'd imagine they would, since they've got a Y chromosome and then I assume the X chromosomes turn on and off randomly the same way they do in females.

In less nerdy news, if you go through about a dozen pictures, you'll find that some of them are out of proportion or have their mouths open, but have the coat color in the mouth.