Reddit and Twitter have a habit of sparking some seriously fun debates when pictures are posted that aren’t quite as they seem.
Now, here’s another optical illusion that’s floating around the internet—and you won’t believe what you see when you take a closer look at it.
See if you can determine what sort of animal you’re looking at:
Did you catch that one?
Robert Maguire, a research director for CREW, an ethics-based legal firm in Washington, D.C., likes to trip up his Twitter followers with some tricky brainteasers in his spare time. He tweeted out that a picture of a crow he found was “interesting because ... it’s actually a cat.”
Since he first tweeted the image in late October of 2018, it’s made the rounds on the internet. It picked up 58,000 unique retweets and 164,000 likes, with a whopping 1,300 people chiming in to express their delight, fascination, and utter disbelief over the mind bender.
Among the comments, Reed Mideke shared, “Google reverse images says ... not just a crow, but specifically an ‘American crow’”—to which Twitter users had plenty of fun responding, calling it “failed machine learning.” Some thought “American crow” sounded like the name of a hit new band.
Optical illusions tend to be some of the most popular ways to engage on social media specifically because there can be so many different ways of perceiving the same thing. Take ink blots for example.
As with the white and yellow, which turned out to be a black-and-blue dress in fact, the discussions generated by these opinions say probably more about ourselves than they do of what we’re actually looking at.
The “American crow” gag pays homage to philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s classic “duckrabbit,” which looks like a duck when you focus on one angle and a rabbit when you change your focus.
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