Chrissy Teigen Wants to Know What the Hell This Is

Chrissy Teigen wants to know what the hell this is — and now so do a lot of other people too.

The model shared the freaky-looking picture on Thursday, asking her 13.5million followers: "WHAT IS THIS?????????"

The riddle was made even more intriguing as the person who originally posted the image complained the thingamajig was "$2500 down the drain" — meaning it either cost that and it got destroyed, or they ordered something online for that amount and it didn't quite live up to expectation.

Suggestions on Chrissy's feed came thick and fast, including "an oyster trying on boots", "a pelvic exam gone wrong", "a copy of Gustav Klimpt's The Kiss that melted", and, of course, "a woman sitting on a washing machine with a hat in her hands and a hat on the washer and a chicken."

Chrissy mused: "Is it photoshopped just to f--k with us? I think it is!"

And it turns out she was right. Or at least, half right — while the picture wasn't created by Photoshop, it was certainly made "just to f--k with us".

As a number of her followers pointed out, the image is actually generated by AI specifically to confuse your brain.

It is made up of a number of recognizable images, combined in such a way as to make them individually indecipherable.

It is one of a number of similar images floating around on the Internet that are supposedly designed to give the viewer a visual representation of what it is like to suffer a stroke, in which the brain knows it knows what something is — but doesn't know what it is.

Reacting to a similar image that went viral last year, Dr. Steven Schlozman, assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, explained to Live Science why the images cause such discomfort.

"I think the creepiness comes from our brains' attempts at recognizing a pattern, zeroing in on that pattern, and then having the expected pattern continually disrupted by another recognizable pattern," he said.

"I swear I see a chimp in that photo. But then it becomes something else, and then something else. I can't complete the puzzle," he added. "I can get some of it, but never enough to know what I'm seeing."