This is sick. I can't believe as human beings we still do this to other conscious creatures with feelings. It's emotionally traumatizing.
It's wrong.
It's wrong.
This is almost the same as studies where they show humans a set of images and ask them which they like the most. Except in this case, they just show them the images and try to measure it.
Most of these comments are blowing this out of proportion.
I.e. it's evolving images that this neuron thinks look most like a monkey, or a person. It's not the only neuron making that judgment, and it's all super nonlinear, so ofc it looks strange and distorted.
It's literally just doing this but with a real neuron instead of a virtual one: http://yosinski.com/deepvis