From Pixels to Psychology: AI’s Journey into Subliminal Messages
How you can start understanding & creating AI images with hidden meaning
How you can start understanding & creating AI images with hidden meaning
What makes you compelled to feel something, to buy something, or click on a link? Have you ever wondered?
Do you feel the urge to buy something because you really want it? or is it possible, that clever images might be making you feel you want it?
It’s hard for you to be sure, isn’t it?
Subliminal advertising is a branch of marketing that aims to make you feel something and influence you not by directly giving you messages, but by trying to affect you at a subconscious level.
Hidden messages, you’re not even aware of.
What if I told you that Generative AI is now starting to experiment with creating content with hidden, subliminal messages in a way that has never been possible before?
Would you like to know how this works? Would you like to see what people are creating with it?
Would you like to try making some yourself?
In this article, I’ll show you where subliminal messaging came from, how people are starting to create it using Generative AI, what people are creating, and how you can also start creating your images with hidden messages.
A Quick History of Subliminal Messaging
The origins of subliminal advertising can be traced by to 1957, when a market researcher called James Vicary managed to get the words ‘Eat Popcorn’ and ‘Drink Coca-Cola’ subtly inserted into a film.
The messages appeared for just fractions of a second in the movie images, too quick to be read by the conscious mind, but long enough to be picked up by the unconscious mind.
He claimed in a report this had increased the sales of snacks, but later admitted he had faked the results. However, he had succeeded in arousing the concern of the public as well as the curiosity of academia and the government.
While initial research in the 1960s tended to discredit the effect, research from the 1990s onwards started to uncover increasing evidence of subtle but measurable effects of subliminal messages.
Some of the examples where advertisers have experimented with this range from the subtle to the not-very-subtle, and certainly some created in earlier decades look quite dated now, if not ridiculous!
An article by Business Insider illustrates some classic examples.
Flip the original image upside down, does sex sell?
One ring to rule them all? or can we see Coca-Cola engraved on the ring of power? Did you notice that during the film?
Antevenio magazine shows some other classic corporate subliminal messaging in logos.
You’ve seen the Amazon logo many times, but have you noticed the arrow at the bottom — how it connects the letters A-Z? Some believe this message is about conveying subliminally that you can find every type of product on Amazon from A-Z.
Another example of messages hiding in plain site is the FedEx logo. Can you see between the letters E and x, and arrow is formed in the negative space?
This can be a way of expressing the speed with which they deliver, or the directness and straightforwardness of their service.
Did you see it?
Subliminal Messaging in the Age of AI
Since Generative AI is still relatively new, the examples of its use for creating subliminal messages in content are still relatively early and only just starting to be explored.
The ability for Generative AI to create content for you quickly, including images that look incredibly realistic yet that can create impossible things for you holds great potential for this area I believe.
Here are some interesting examples I’ve found using Generative AI in an article from Laptop Mag to create images with hidden meaning, which may surprise you.
I’ve put the hidden message in the caption under each image if you struggle to see it, I suggest you can best see the messages by squinting your eyes a bit and moving back a little from the image.
Did you manage to see all the hidden messages?
How you can create AI images with Subliminal Messaging
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