September 2022 was apparently the month artificial intelligence essay angst boiled over in academia, as various media outlets published opinion pieces lamenting the rise of AI writing systems that will ruin student writing and pave the way toward unprecedented levels of academic misconduct. Then, on Sept. 23, academic Twitter exploded into a bit of a panic on this topic. The firestorm was prompted by a post to the OpenAI subreddit where user Urdadgirl69 claimed to be getting straight A's with essays "written" using artificial intelligence. Professors on Reddit and Twitter alike expressed frustration and concern about how best to address the threat of AI essays. One of the most poignant and widely retweeted laments came from Redditor ahumanlikeyou, who wrote, "Grading something an AI wrote is an incredibly depressing waste of my life."

With the explosion of visual information nowadays, millions of digital images are available to the users. How to efficiently explore a large set of images and retrieve useful information thus becomes extremely important. Unfortunately only some of the images can impress the user at first glance. Others that make little sense in human perception are often discarded, while still costing valuable time and space. Therefore, it is significant to identify these two kinds of images for relieving the load of online repositories and accelerating information retrieval process. However, most of the existing image properties, e.g., memorability and popularity, are based on repeated human interactions, which limit the research and application of evaluating image quality in terms of instantaneous impression. In this paper, we propose a novel image property, called impressiveness, that measures how images impress people with a short-term contact. This is based on an impression-driven model inspired by a number of important human perceptual cues. To achieve this, we first collect three datasets in various domains, which are labeled according to the instantaneous sensation of the annotators. Then we investigate the impressiveness property via six established human perceptual cues as well as the corresponding features from pixel to semantic levels. Sequentially, we verify the consistency of the impressiveness which can be quantitatively measured by multiple visual representations, and evaluate their latent relationships. Finally, we apply the proposed impressiveness property to rank the images for an efficient image recommendation system.