Same Energy

February 14, 2021 10:28 PM

A visual search engine (in open beta) that finds images by style and mood. Try typing in colors, emotions, weather conditions, nouns, adjectives, and anything else you can think of, and see if it finds pictures with that same energy for you!
posted by Eyebrows McGee (35 comments total)

Hmm, fishy. The word 'sage' gets some weird results.
posted by Thella at 11:13 PM on February 14, 2021 [3 favorites]

Envy certainly does seem to present a coherent theme, but not the one I was expecting.
posted by drnick at 11:41 PM on February 14, 2021 [3 favorites]

And pensive is mostly cats, which is... interesting. (Though not as disturbing as that envy link above.)
posted by bcd at 12:46 AM on February 15, 2021

Is there an explainer of how it works? It would be interesting to see why these results are what they are.

I tried bland (not bland!)
Brick (brick!)
Chowder (mostly chowder)
Tan (vaguely tanning related)
posted by chavenet at 1:22 AM on February 15, 2021

This is great and very useful. I wonder how long it will be before all visual research will have this capability–Pinterest, for example.
posted by marimeko at 2:58 AM on February 15, 2021 [1 favorite]

It may not be immediately clear from the description, but you can also use an image as the "seed" for the search, and I found this to be just as interesting.

For example, here's a photo of a monarch butterfly sitting on a woman's hand from the USWS website being used as a seed.

And here are the first results of that "search".

Clicking on a new image in the search results (in this case a butterfly on a bunny) will give you a new round of images.
posted by jeremias at 3:37 AM on February 15, 2021 [4 favorites]

‘Philosopher’ brings up Steve Jobs, Julian Assange, and Mark Zuckerberg.
posted by Phanx at 3:51 AM on February 15, 2021

Pretty useful, though, and endlessly fascinating.
posted by Phanx at 4:05 AM on February 15, 2021

This is endlessly entertaining.

"Snow" gives some truly beautiful results. I tried "Dutch" and got .. 90% random Scandinavian stuff, Colonial Williamsburg, etc, and maybe a couple of things that were actually Dutch? Putting in random schools of architecture is fun. Do not try "cringe", it was.. accurate. I like Babylonian art so I tried "Babylonian" and I got 100% sci-fi. Not sure what's going on there. This is going to waste my day, but I'm not complaining.
posted by antinomia at 4:27 AM on February 15, 2021

"Good" is not good
"Nice" is confusing, and not nice
"Cheese" is reassuringly cheese
Keen to see this develop; the search from image function seems fun.
posted by threecheesetrees at 4:43 AM on February 15, 2021 [1 favorite]

I also want to know more about how this works. So far a lot of the results are similar to what Google image search gives (minus the most abstract things like "good"), including how "related images" can lead you to subtle variations on the original theme. And uploading a butterfly on a hand to Google image search gives me more photos of butterflies on hands.

Would love a technical overview of this project but I can't seem to find anything deeper on their site unfortunately.
posted by Dee Grim at 4:48 AM on February 15, 2021

Tried NSFW. It was ... not safe for work. Only naked women though. And, oddly, one image blurred that I had to click on to see because it featured "female nudity." (Which ALL THE OTHER IMAGES ALSO FEATURED BUT WERE NOT BLURRED.)
posted by chavenet at 5:11 AM on February 15, 2021

Only naked women though

Yeah, "rockabilly" is 99 percent women (where people are in the photos).

Takis (snack food) brings up all kinds of snack foods but not Takis?

Schadenfreude is unknown to this search engine.

I have questions.
posted by MonkeyToes at 6:21 AM on February 15, 2021 [1 favorite]

Ha. A search for "harmony" gives you blissed out hippie couples, but a search for conTENT brings you CONtent instead. (All of it terrible.)
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 6:48 AM on February 15, 2021

Does what it says on the tin, sometimes.
posted by achrise at 7:27 AM on February 15, 2021

I tried to type "melancholy" but after I'd gotten as for as "mel" I bumped one of the photos that showed up (Halle Berry, for some reason) and now the "for you" section is showing me random white women who wear the same hairstyles Halle Berry does. What.

"Melancholy" has rather more T&A in it than is reasonable by any stretch.

I guess the source of the image corpus and training data would answer a lot of questions.
posted by Western Infidels at 8:40 AM on February 15, 2021

This appears to suffer from something I'm going to call "horny bias."

It has a lot of issues that you'd expect. "Person" pulls up light-skinned (or washed out) masc folks. "Developer" does a little better in terms of diversity (South Asian guys seem to show up in a lot of searches), but femmes and Black people are still MIA. "Insightful" gets you a bunch of screenshots of tweets, which, well, yikes.

But then there's "hopeful" which is entirely sexy shots of light-skinned femme influencers. "Gamer" also pulls up influencer-y shots of women. "Difficult" pulls up selfies and group shots of women interspersed with chat screenshots. Definitely getting a horny-but-aggrieved young guy vibe here.

"Stepsister," thankfully, pulls up a single photo of a guy with a car, which is probably for the best.

Also not sure what's up with "bad," which gets you photos of some pretty nice bathroom fixtures.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 8:42 AM on February 15, 2021 [3 favorites]

"Prince" is largely pictures of Michael Jackson, with some Prince and Hendrix thrown in.

"Interesting" is mostly annotated pictures of aircraft.

"Before" and "after" aren't recognized as search terms but "fleek" is.
posted by Western Infidels at 8:51 AM on February 15, 2021 [2 favorites]

"Bad" (prounced a bit like "bot") means "bath" in Dutch (so maybe also in German?). I tried a bunch of Dutch adjectives, but the only one that worked was "lekker" which means tasty or sometimes nice in the sense of "nice weather".
posted by antinomia at 8:51 AM on February 15, 2021 [1 favorite]

You might be saddened (but not shocked) to find that "brother" has a racial theme. You may be surprised to see which one, though.

I have to stop poking at this before I waste all day. Apparently.
posted by Western Infidels at 9:13 AM on February 15, 2021

I had disappointing results when using search text that was more than one word.

But, as mentioned above, it works great with a seed image. For example, I did a google image search for "open road ahead" and downloaded one I liked, then clicked the camera icon on same.energy and uploaded that image.

From there, click another result from the set, and continue.

From their About page. "style and mood" -- yes.

We believe that image search should be visual, using only a minimum of words. And we believe it should integrate a rich visual understanding, capturing the artistic style and overall mood of an image, not just the objects in it.
...
The default feeds available on the home page are algorithmically curated: a seed of 5-20 images are selected by hand, then our system builds the feed by scanning millions of images in our index to find good matches for the seed images. You can create feeds in just the same way: save images to create a collection of seed images, then look at the recommended images.

~~~
Perhaps the bad searches posted in this thread used an image from the internet with a tag or associated text that matched the search term. This could easily send it off in the wrong direction.
posted by jjj606 at 9:20 AM on February 15, 2021 [1 favorite]

I tried uploading some images of drawings I made and it did a kind of alarmingly good job of grouping them with things that were also drawn in a similar style, with similar colors, and even not totally off on content
posted by velebita at 10:00 AM on February 15, 2021

Almost every single photo for "confident" is a male gaze-ey picture of a woman with large breasts, and I think I might be pretty depressed about what that says about this tool and also the entire goddamned world.
posted by jacquilynne at 10:19 AM on February 15, 2021 [4 favorites]

According to the about page, this is the work of one person - Jacob. Although he uses the word "we" a lot, the answer to "who made this" was just him. I'm guessing the training data was some publicly available corpus like instagram or pintrest, which might explain the abundance of horny gaze bias described by evidenceofabsence. (I'm assuming that defining and then building a non biased corpus of training data is a huge task, and not something one dude can pull off as a hobby.)
EDIT: OK now I'm seeing lots of reddit watermarks, so maybe that was the training data?
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 11:09 AM on February 15, 2021 [1 favorite]

I like Babylonian art so I tried "Babylonian" and I got 100% sci-fi. Not sure what's going on there.

Babylon 5, maybe, but "Ishtar Gate" isn't any better.
posted by Iris Gambol at 11:38 AM on February 15, 2021 [1 favorite]

exciting is almost entirely photos of corgis in or with boxes
posted by Acheman at 12:55 PM on February 15, 2021 [3 favorites]

“20th Century” pulled a bunch of pictures that looked like the centuries preceding it.

“1985” yielded mostly Nike shoes.

I tried the word “wistful” and was informed that the engine had never heard of it.

I really like the idea, but the implementation seems hasty and unwarrantedly self-assured.
posted by armeowda at 1:25 PM on February 15, 2021

Getting the same garbage results as everybody else. Did anybody say this is trash yet? This is trash.
posted by cashman at 1:53 PM on February 15, 2021

Apparently, shrimp is delicious, whereas pizza is tasty, tacos are flavorful, roasted chicken is delectable, midwest-style cheese dips are appetizing, and yummy things are... not.
posted by scose at 3:20 PM on February 15, 2021 [1 favorite]

"The word 'ennui' isn't recognized by our system. Try uploading a picture of it instead."
posted by Iris Gambol at 4:19 PM on February 15, 2021 [2 favorites]

> "Stepsister," thankfully, pulls up a single photo of a guy with a car, which is probably for the best.

I wouldn't be surprised if that one was rigged.
posted by nosewings at 4:41 PM on February 15, 2021

I really like the idea, but the implementation seems hasty and unwarrantedly self-assured.

Agreed - I think there's some interesting results once you find a picture you like and then want others in a similar mood. Getting the first result didn't work as well as you might hope, though.
posted by jacquilynne at 5:34 PM on February 15, 2021

yawning cat energy
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 9:02 PM on February 15, 2021 [1 favorite]

Searching for cheesecake brings up literal cheesecake. Searching for almost anything else seems to bring up figurative cheesecake.

That said, clicking around on pictures I liked was fun. Got lots of retro futurism, maps, architecture. It feels a bit like the fast food version of tumblr in it's heyday.
posted by condour75 at 4:58 AM on February 16, 2021

yawning cat energy
Why is everyone on this Zoom call screaming?
posted by evidenceofabsence at 8:58 PM on February 16, 2021