Which word best describes what this person is thinking or feeling?
- upsetRight answerWhen something has gone wrong and you feel sad or hurt about it.
- sleepyWhen you feel tired and ready to fall asleep.
- shyWhen you feel unsure around other people and would rather not be noticed.
- scaredWhen you feel afraid that something bad is about to happen.
How the photographs were made
None of these people exists. Each face started as a few sentences describing a person and a feeling. A model turned the sentences into a photograph, three times in different light, and we kept the one that read best. The photograph above is the first practice one, with its answer marked.
The description behind the photograph above
Every description has four parts. The first is the same for all of them; the person, the feeling and the light change each time.
- The lookShared by every photograph
- A black and white photograph, tightly cropped to the eye region of one adult: from just above the eyebrows to just below the lower eyelids. Both eyes fully visible, the bridge of the nose visible, no mouth, no hair except where it meets the forehead. Landscape framing, 5:2 width to height. Candid documentary photography, like a crop from a magazine portrait: real skin texture, pores and fine lines, natural light, slight film grain, no retouching, no stylised makeup, no illustration or 3D render look, no text, no border, no watermark. The gaze and the small movements of brows, lids and the muscles around the eyes must carry the mental state on their own, since nothing else of the face is shown. Keep the expression subtle, as caught in a real moment, never acted or exaggerated.
- The person
- A Black man, about 55, grey at the temples.
- The feelingWritten for the eyes alone
- Brows drawn together and lifted at the inner ends, eyes slightly glassy, gaze a little downward. Hurt rather than angry.
- The light
- Soft window light from one side.
From a description to one photograph
- The look
- One paragraph for every face: black and white, cropped from just above the brows to just below the lower lids, the feel of a candid magazine portrait, real skin, a little grain. No mouth, no text, nothing that looks drawn.
- The people
- Twenty women and twenty men, aged 18 to 75, from eight backgrounds, five faces each. Two wear glasses. Each has a small detail of their own, so no two faces are alike.
- The feelings
- Each one is written as what the eyes can show on their own: brows, lids, the skin around them, where the gaze goes and how strongly. Eighteen people look straight at you and twenty-two look away, spread evenly across pleasant, unpleasant and neutral feelings, so where someone looks never gives the answer.
- Three takes
- Every face was made three times, in window light, in flat daylight and in warm lamp light.
- Making them
- OpenAI's GPT Image, run from the Codex command line, four at a time. Every description was saved before it ran, so each photograph can be traced to its exact words.
- Picking one
- We looked at all 126 and threw out anything wrong first: a mouth, text, colour, an eye that looked off, a gaze that gave the feeling away. Then we asked which word most people would pick, and kept the take whose brows and lids matched the description at its quietest.
- Second tries
- Three feelings came out as something else. Ashamed looked exhausted, proud looked grateful, relieved looked sad. We rewrote their descriptions and made them again.
The words
Forty feelings, one per photograph, and each of them also appears as a wrong answer somewhere else, so no word stands out by being rare. The three wrong answers on a photograph always share its tone, pleasant, unpleasant or neutral, so the mood alone never gives it away. Words a ten-year-old knows, with a one-line meaning for each in both languages. In Spanish every word agrees with the person in the photograph.
amused · ashamed · bored · calm · confident · confused · curious · daydreaming · defiant · disappointed · doubtful · excited · exhausted · fed up · flirting · focused · frustrated · grateful · guilty · hopeful · hostile · hurt · impressed · insisting · interested · jealous · mocking · nervous · playful · proud · reassuring · relieved · remembering · surprised · suspicious · tender · thoughtful · waiting · watchful · worried
The practice photographs use words that are not on this list.
Which photographs stay
A photograph earns its place when enough people agree on it. After 225 answers, it stays if at least half the people chose the word it was made for and no other word drew more than a quarter of them. That is the rule the original test used to go from 40 photographs to 36, and the same rule will be applied here, in public, once the answers are in.
Staysboth hold
Droppedeither fails
The rule as bands, after 225 answers to a photo. No answers have been counted yet, so there is no data in it.
Coming later: fading in five steps
For every photograph there are now five versions of the same person, the feeling getting fainter from one to the next. They are the material for a version of the test that gets subtler as you get answers right and tells you the faintest feeling you can still read. They are not in the test yet.
- L1Clearest
- L2
- L3
- L4
- L5Barely there
Five steps per feeling, drawn as falling bars. A sketch of the idea, not ratings.