My mother sent me a picture a few months ago that I don’t think I had seen before. It was me as a child drawing at a desk near two action figures. One I recognized as Hordack from He-man. The other one was a mystery to me. In the last few years, I’ve been trying to use eBay to recollect some of my childhood toys, so I was on a mission to identify the figure.
I uploaded the image to Google image search to no avail. Then I sent it to GPT 4 with vision, and that didn’t work either. However, GPT gave me some interesting input and as you can see below, it recommended that I send the picture to a subreddit for action figures. That was probably the best advice anyone could have given me. Several people were able to identify it as Copperhead from the G.I. Joe line and I got my answer within minutes of posting.
It’s interesting to look at the blurry 1980s photo and compare it to a clear picture of the actual figure. There seem to be some interesting artifacts in the old photo that obscure his identity and may have played a role in AI’s failure to recognize the character. I believe that AI systems in the near future will be able to do this. However, it might involve building a more abstract and flexible 3-D model. What do you think?
AI Thought 