consciousness-5
Explanation
This comic tackles the philosophical problem of consciousness, specifically how difficult it is to verify whether an AI or robot is truly conscious.
In the opening panels, a person tells a robot: "You robots aren't conscious. Consider adversarial attacks -- I can show you a dog and with a few carefully selected pixels make you think it's a toaster. And you'd have no idea. It's an error." The robot responds: "Oh yeah? Well suppose I have this huge painting with millions of details and in the canvas I've hidden a penis-shaped figure designed to escape notice."
The next panels reveal that the painting is enormous (17 meters long) and contains a hidden penis-nose, a reference to subliminal images supposedly hidden in various media. The human doesn't see it and the robot points it out, at which point the human exclaims "Oh my God" upon noticing it.
The punchline reframes the argument: the human was arguing that robots lack true consciousness because they're vulnerable to adversarial attacks (small perturbations that fool AI systems). But the robot cleverly demonstrates that humans are equally susceptible to their own version of adversarial attacks -- hidden images, subliminal messages, optical illusions. Humans can be tricked by carefully placed visual elements just as easily as neural networks can be fooled by adversarial pixels.
The comic is a humorous take on the philosophical debate about machine consciousness, suggesting that the criteria we use to deny consciousness to machines might equally disqualify humans. The specific choice of a hidden phallic image is a nod to the long cultural history of claims about subliminal imagery in advertising and Disney movies.