The r/WhatIsThisThing subreddit is a pretty old community. It has been alive for about 15 years now. Bored Panda spoke to one of the community's moderators back in 2020, and they told us what the reasons behind the subreddit's success might be. It's that people like playing amateur detectives and helping others find out what their mystery object is.

Redditors love to share their knowledge, and it's especially rewarding when knowing something niche helps someone else. "Many [people] have unique and obscure knowledge and they like to use it. Get enough of them together and they cover most things," the moderator told us a few years back. It's hard not to get involved when some interesting items show up – that's another reason for the subreddit's popularity.

Back then, the moderator also told Bored Panda that almost all mystery cases get solved. "A majority of things are solved within 15 minutes of posting," the mod said. The Redditor assessed that about 10% of the posters never get final answers. With a community of 2.7 million people, it's no wonder how quick it can be – its strength is in its numbers.

On a more serious note, there's also an affiliated subreddit called Trace an Object. Internet sleuths can put their skills to good use by searching for items posted by Europol and Australia's "Trace an Object" websites or the FBI's "Endangered Child Alert Program." "We've had some luck in identifying some things, but there's more yet unsolved and more to come as Europol does release some new information every few months," the community's moderator told us in 2020.

With all this talk about identifying strange objects from pictures, one has to think about whether we could use AI to do the job. If Dog Scanner can tell me how much shih tzu my little rescue pooch has in him, why can't I use it to identify an unknown object? We consulted Celia Quillian, a digital creator who shares her knowledge about artificial intelligence on TikTok and Instagram.

Celia tells us that current AI models are capable of helping us identify an unknown object in a picture. "While at this point in time there are no AI models that can identify absolutely everything, there are many AI tools that have image recognition features," Quillian explains. The best-known tools for that include ChatGPTPlus, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot. "I've used these myself to help identify photos of plants or animals on nature walks," Celia adds.

What would the step-by-step look like? "Simply snap a photo of the thing in question and upload [it] to your AI tool with a prompt like 'I came across this <thing/animal/plant> today in <extra context if helpful.> Can you help me identify what it might be?'" According to Quillian, the AI tool might need some help for better identification, like the already mentioned context. 

"A more detailed description of the thing if the image is lower quality or taken from far away can be helpful in identifying [it]," Celia explains. "Generally, the tool will tell you outright what the thing is, or, if it is less clear, it will tell you that it may have trouble with the identification but could propose some suggestions of what it might be."

Naturally, AI still isn't perfect and you might run into some challenges. Celia Quillian says that it all comes down to the quality and quantity of training data the AI model has on visuals of this particular type of object. 

"Say you made a unique object at home out of a variety of things around the house and posted it to the Internet saying 'This invention is called a Riesmatch!' If you were to then upload a photo of the 'Reismatch' into an AI tool and ask it to identify it, it would not be able to come up with the 'correct' name but rather suggest a description of all of the recognized objects it is made of."

If the image is low quality, blurry, or taken from far away, it might be difficult for the AI tool to identify it. "The quality and abundance of the training data goes the other way as well when it comes to AI image generation," Quillian explains. It's a simple way of saying that AI can have bias too, based on the data it received during its training. 

Celia explains with an example: "If the great majority of images with the label 'Professional' that the AI was trained upon were pictures of white men, giving it the prompt 'Make me an image of a professional' is very likely to result in a picture of a white man, unless there is extra additional detail in the prompt to request a different gender or race, or extra training in the model to specifically avoid such bias."

So maybe it's still too early to expect AI to recognize an old-timey letter seal. Good thing the r/WhatIsThisThing subreddit exists, then! But still, is AI image recognition technology headed that way? Our AI expert says that the most exciting use of it is in medical images. "AI image recognition will allow doctors to detect and diagnose diseases and medical images even faster and earlier."

And some companies are already doing that! Like the Lithuanian startup Oxipit, which creates AI tools for global medical imaging. Companies that use this technology might help in addressing the global radiologist shortage and improve diagnostic quality.

However, with the rapid development of AI image recognition technology there also are some ethical considerations to take into account. "From an ethical standpoint, there are also use cases from the security front that involve AI image recognition to monitor for suspicious activities or detecting threats," Celia Quillian tells Bored Panda.

"While this can be beneficial in many ways, there are also ethical considerations – will [there be] privacy or data collection without a person's knowing consent? Could models for detecting suspicious activity similarly be trained on a biased set of data, leading the AI to more frequently raise false alarms for certain populations of people?"

"I think one of the larger risks, which can be mitigated, is the inherent bias the training data set could have for all use cases, without the proper bounds in place," Quillian adds.