This sounds a little like it might be related to how adversarial images work, because it sounds like the same kind of idea - you trick an image classifier into

This sounds a little like it might be related to how adversarial images work, because it sounds like the same kind of idea - you trick an image classifier into believing that it sees something that isn't really there. In a way, I guess pareidolia is just our version of adversarial images - It's just that we ascribe more obvious things (things that look like eyes, noses, mouths, etc) to the reason why we see faces, whereas I imagine an image classifier just happens to see random pixels that are the same or something like that.