Malaysians Spooked By “Mystery Person” In Ghibli-fied Images – AI Tapping Into Supernatural?

Before you whip out your salt and garlic, here’s why there is no reason to start exorcising your homes.

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The current trend of turning Raya family photos into the Studio Ghibli art style has taken off lately. Many are using artificial intelligence (AI) apps and tools to do so and we admit, the results are usually quite cute.

However, AI can create pretty terrifying or creepy images at times, which can lead some to believe that there are supernatural forces at work. Could AI actually capture or detect ghosts in photographs? Many social media users seem to think so.

Who’s that in the picture?

One example of an extra figure being generated is a TikTok post by user Aien Ibrahim, showing a Raya family photo that was put through an AI transformation to give it a Hayao Miyazaki treatment. In case you didn’t know, Miyazaki is the founder of Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation studio responsible for creating masterpieces such as My Neighbour Totoro and Spirited Away.

Coming back to the photo, there are 12 people in the original picture but 13 in the AI rendition.

The original photo has 12 people in it, but note the three young girls in the front row.

The AI generated photo. There’s a fourth young girl in the front row.

The post, accompanied by creepy background music, received many comments by users who speculate that the extra person might have been a ghost that the AI detected, which implies that the family members were posing with a spirit unknowingly.

If that was actually true, it would send chills down our spines!

Asking AI about AI things

We’re no AI experts, but the first, most logical explanation is that these Gibli-fied images are not an exact REPLICA of the photos you feed ChatGPT. Instead, they are merely artistic impressions.

We decided to “sit down” with ChatGPT anyway, and ask it to explain what could have caused an extra person to appear in these generated image. After all, it takes one to know one!

So, when asked how a mysterious “extra” could appear in AI-generated photos of real photos, ChatGPT listed a few explanations.

The first one is pattern matching gone wrong – AI models are trained on vast datasets of images, and they learn patterns rather than understanding context. Sometimes, a model might see shapes, shadows, or reflections in a photo and interpret them as an additional person.

Another cause might be overfitting on crowds – If the AI model is trained in lots of group photos, it might expect a certain number of people in a scene. If it sees gaps or ambiguous shapes, it might “fill in” with an extra person to make the image look more typical of it training data. This sounds like it matches with the AI-generated photo in the story!

No human is perfect, hence the reason AI isn’t perfect (yet). Image: Wikimedia Commons)

A third explanation is if the photo is blurry, has reflections, or contains objects that vaguely resemble human figures, the AI might “resolve” the ambiguity by creating another person.

One more reason is that the extra person appears as a result of blending multiple training images. If the AI isn’t good at distinguishing individual elements, it might merge features from different images, resulting in extra limbs or even an entire person.

It’s kind of eerie but fascinating how the AI’s lack of real-world understanding can lead to these surreal glitches!

Just to make sure, we decided to ask ChatGPT if it’s really not a ghost in the picture, and it gave this amusing answer:

So there you have it, AI “ghosts” explained by an AI itself. Believing in ghosts might make good stories, but in this case the explanation makes more sense.

In any case, as Malaysians, we appreciate the spooky imagination!

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