Taking a look at pareidolia | Seth’s Weblog

There’s a face on Mars.

Ever since Viking took this photograph fifty years in the past, some folks have been positive–sure–that it clearly exhibits a face on the planet’s floor. After all, as soon as we had a excessive decision picture from a later mission, all resemblance to a face went away.

Human beings want a narrative, particularly after we’re attempting to grasp one thing we haven’t already labeled. And so we see faces in clouds, in grilled cheese sandwiches and on different planets.

We do it with track lyrics that don’t make sense and with know-how we don’t actually perceive as properly.

A few of the drivers are:

Worry of the unknown.

Novelty and the arrival of one thing new.

Unpredictable inputs that appear to claim some kind of intentional motion and company.

It’s no marvel, then, that LLMs and different types of AI result in waves of pareidolia. We ascribe a gender, a tone of voice and most of all, intent to those laptop applications which might be doing nothing however math. We think about that they’re mendacity to us, manipulating us and on the point of take over the world.

If imagining that there’s slightly individual inside helps you utilize the software higher, that’s fantastic.

However made up tales that we invented to cope with our concern typically make it worse. They distract us from the laborious work of understanding what’s really occurring.

When the main points grow to be extra clear, we’ll then should unlearn all of the personification we insisted on studying.

December 12, 2025