Classification of the lunar surface pattern by AI architectures: Does AI see a rabbit in the Moon?
This work addresses a cultural curiosity about lunar perceptions, but it is incremental as it applies existing AI methods to a novel but niche dataset without broader scientific or practical implications.
The study evaluated whether AI architectures perceive the lunar surface pattern as resembling a rabbit, using seven AI models including CLIP, and found that in low-latitude regions, the pattern was classified more as a rabbit than a face, with ConvNeXt and CLIP showing relatively high probabilities for rabbit classification.
In Asian countries, there is a tradition that a rabbit, known as the Moon rabbit, lives on the Moon. Typically, two reasons are mentioned for the origin of this tradition. The first reason is that the color pattern of the lunar surface resembles the shape of a rabbit. The second reason is that both the Moon and rabbits are symbols of fertility, as the Moon appears and disappears (i.e., waxing and waning) cyclically and rabbits are known for their high fertility. Considering the latter reason, is the color pattern of the lunar surface not similar to a rabbit? Here, the similarity between rabbit and the lunar surface pattern was evaluated using seven AI architectures. In the test conducted with Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP), which can classify images based on given words, it was assumed that people frequently observe the Moon in the early evening. Under this condition, the lunar surface pattern was found to be more similar to a rabbit than a face in low-latitude regions, while it could also be classified as a face as the latitude increases. This result is consistent with that the oldest literatures about the Moon rabbit were written in India and that a tradition of seeing a human face in the Moon exists in Europe. In a 1000-class test using seven AI architectures, ConvNeXt and CLIP sometimes classified the lunar surface pattern as a rabbit with relatively high probabilities. Cultures are generated by our attitude to the environment. Both dynamic and static similarities may be essential to induce our imagination.