The connection to selfies is really weak. Its just classical conditioning. The stimulus is the food not the selfie taking, and the continued pressing of the selfie button without food is conditioned response.
Artist trained rats to take selfies to make a point about social media
11–20 of 101 posts
Re: Artist trained rats to take selfies to make a point about social media
#12When I was.a kid, I "learned" from some authority (TV? book?) that cats and dogs could not recognize process two dimensional images, and that a TV was therefore just visual noise to them.
When I was a kid I was taught by every adult that "humans cannot discern more than 24 fps".
Except that we could all immediately tell if a Commodore Amiga demo was running at 25fps or 50fps and groups that'd have the frame rate drop from 50 to 25fps on some frames were "lame".
So I knew it was obviously false that humans couldn't discern when something was running at more than 24 fps.
Same when little Windows 95 utilities allowed to bump the framerate from 60 to 72 or 75 Hz. I remember those: they'd enhance the experience. Yet everybody was still telling me: "Why do you even bother, 60 Hz is enough, humans cannot discern more than 24 images per second".
Same for cats and dogs and the TV of course. Which I knew was wrong because on my Commodore Amiga I'd take a big circle, filled with a solid color, and make it bounce across the screen and watch my cats' reactions.
People can be really extremely dumb, even in the face of evidence.
Re: Artist trained rats to take selfies to make a point about social media
#13The connection to selfies is really weak. Its just classical conditioning. The stimulus is the food not the selfie taking, and the continued pressing of the selfie button without food is conditioned response.
Even that is attributing too much. When you give animals food, they tend to do things to get that food, humans being no exception. If you plant a soft-serve machine in the middle of a city square, you can bet people will press the lever to receive free ice cream. Hell, just give out coupons for free anything and people will show up. In either case, if you take away the free thing, people will keep returning in hopes the thing will come back, not just because they've been conditioned but because they want more of the free thing.
Neat little art project, but it's not that insightful when you think outside the 34th percentile.
Re: Artist trained rats to take selfies to make a point about social media
#14When I was.a kid, I "learned" from some authority (TV? book?) that cats and dogs could not recognize process two dimensional images, and that a TV was therefore just visual noise to them.
Cats and dogs need higher refresh rates to see TV as a movie rather than a slideshow of images: https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/8921/why-can-cat...
Re: Artist trained rats to take selfies to make a point about social media
#15What's the copyright situation of rat selfies?
Re: Artist trained rats to take selfies to make a point about social media
#16The connection to selfies is really weak. Its just classical conditioning. The stimulus is the food not the selfie taking, and the continued pressing of the selfie button without food is conditioned response.
The selfie taking draws a parallel between rats in a Skinner box and humans in social media. The point is to make people wonder whether social media companies view their users the same way Skinner viewed his rats in a box: dumb, and able to be manipulated with meager and cheap rewards.
It is not a functional piece of the "experiment", but I don't think it was ever meant to be functional or a real experiment. The artist says the rats don't recognize themselves, so I would assume they predicted the selfies would do nothing.
The selfie taking is the only interesting part of the piece, imo. Without that, it's just replicating an 80 year old experiment that has already been replicated to death.
Re: Artist trained rats to take selfies to make a point about social media
#17What's the copyright situation of rat selfies?
I think it's established that photos taken by animals are not copyrightable works, so you can do anything you want with them, at least in the USA.
Re: Artist trained rats to take selfies to make a point about social media
#18When I was.a kid, I "learned" from some authority (TV? book?) that cats and dogs could not recognize process two dimensional images, and that a TV was therefore just visual noise to them.
It is very easy (and amusing) to prove this wrong by playing a video of birds / fish / other wild animals and let your cat watch :)
Re: Artist trained rats to take selfies to make a point about social media
#19The connection to selfies is really weak. Its just classical conditioning. The stimulus is the food not the selfie taking, and the continued pressing of the selfie button without food is conditioned response.
It's an artistic remix of the classic Skinner Box experiment.
The creator is an artist, not a scientist, and his point is being artistically rather than scientifically.
As a sidenote: Social media has been described as a skinner box a million times before, but expressing it literally like this is, IMO, clever, interesting, and also cute. The idea using scientific experiments as metaphor to make art is cool, and I hope people start to do more things like this.
Re: Artist trained rats to take selfies to make a point about social media
#20What's the copyright situation of rat selfies?
Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly?) it's not the first time that question has come up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
Note that this also may have implications for AI-generated work.
Here's how, ignoring the many legal theories, it's handled in practice in the US right now:
> On 21 August 2014 the United States Copyright Office published an opinion [..] to clarify that "only works created by a human can be copyrighted under United States law, which excludes photographs and artwork created by animals or by machines without human intervention".
However note that whether it's "copyright free" will depend on the jurisdiction and also that the article is talking about a french artist. While copyright law is very same-ish across the globe (and countries recognize each other's copyright), it often varies in the fine details.