There are 18 images in the Reddit slideshow and they all feature the same recurring composition and facial expression. For some, this sequence of smiling faces elicits a sense of warmth and joyousness, comprising a visual narrative of some sort of shared humanity (so long as one pays no attention to the incongruousness of Spanish Conquistadors smiling happily next to Aztec warriors. Awkward.) But what immediately jumped out at me is that these AI-generated images were beaming a secret message hidden in plain sight. A steganographic deception within the pixels, perfectly legible to your brain yet without the conscious awareness that it’s being conned. Like other AI “hallucinations,” these algorithmic extrusions were telling a made up story with a straight face — or, as the story turns out, with a lying smile.
Why do you smile the way you do? A silly question, of course, since it’s only “natural” to smile the way you do, isn’t it? It’s common sense. How else would someone smile?
As a person who was not born in the U.S., who immigrated here from the former Soviet Union, as I did, this question is not so simple. In 2006, as part of her Ph.D. dissertation, “The Phenomenon of the Smile in Russian, British and American Cultures,” Maria Arapova, a professor of Russian language and cross-cultural studies at Lomonosov Moscow State University, asked 130 university students from the U.S., Europe, and Russia to imagine they had just made eye contact with a stranger in a public place — at the bus stop, near an elevator, on the subway, etc.
Which, she asked the participants, would you do next?
A) smile and then look away
B) look away
C) gaze at his eyes, then look away
90% of Americans and Europeans chose the option with a smile in it. Only 15% of Russians did.
How we smile, when we smile, why we smile, and what it means is deeply culturally contextual. In the 2018 Nautilus essay, “What a Russian Smile Means,” French-American journalist Camille Baker writes about how the meaning of a smile differs across societies.
In 2015 Kuba Krys, a researcher at the Polish Academy of Sciences, studied the reactions of more than 5,000 people from 44 cultures to a series of photographs of smiling and unsmiling men and women of different races. He and his colleagues found that subjects who were socialized in cultures with low levels of “uncertainty avoidance” — which refers to the level at which someone engages with norms, traditions, and bureaucracy to avoid ambiguity — were more likely to believe that smiling faces looked unintelligent. These subjects considered the future to be uncertain, and smiling — a behavior associated with confidence — to be inadvisable. Russian culture ranks very low on uncertainty avoidance, and Russians rate the intelligence of a smiling face significantly lower than other cultures.
Krys’s team also found that people from countries with high levels of government corruption were more likely to rate a smiling face as dishonest. Russians — whose culture ranked 135 out of 180 in a recent worldwide survey of corruption levels — rated smiling faces as honest with less frequency than 35 of the 44 cultures studied. Corruption corrupts smiling, too.
Russians interpret the expressions of their officials and leaders differently from Americans. Americans expect public figures to smile at them as a means of emphasizing social order and calm. Russians, on the other hand, find it appropriate for public officials to maintain a solemn expression in public, as their behavior is expected to mirror the serious nature of their work. A toothy “dominance smile” from an important American public figure inspires feelings of confidence and promise in Americans. Russians expect, instead, a stern look from their leaders meant to demonstrate “serious intentions, validity, and reliability.”
Which is how an AI trained on a dataset dominated by a culture that takes photos like this:
