Letting neural networks be weird

Candy Heart messages written by a neural network

Around Valentine’s Day in the US and UK, these things called candy hearts (or conversation hearts or sweethearts) appear: small and sugary, bearing a simple, short Valentine’s message. There are only room for a few characters, so they read something like “LOVE YOU” or “CALL ME” or “BE MINE”.

I collected all the genuine heart messages I could find, and then gave them to a learning algorithm called a neural network. Given a set of data, a neural network will learn the patterns that let it imitate the original data - although its imitation is sometimes imperfect. The candy heart messages it produced… well, you be the judge.

The neural net did produce some that would pass for - and arguably improve upon - the standard messages.

DEAR ME
MY MY
LOVE BOT
CUTE KISS
MY BEAR
LOVE BUN

Others were in the same spirit, but perhaps not quite as effective.

YOU A LOVE
AM GOOD
YOU ARE BABE
ME MY <3
YOU ARE IT
HEART ME
SWEET PEAR
COOL CUD
FANCY MY HERO

Others were, um, strange. I don’t know what they mean, but some of them might work on me.

ALL HOVER
OOG LOVE
TEAM BEAR
TIME HUG
PIN A FACE
YOU’RE ME
SWOOL MAT
BOG LOVE
I HONKER
HOW COT
BEAR WIG
FANG
BE A GOOL
TWEET UP BAT
WIRLY OOT
I WANDER
TIME STAR

These will probably not be one of the standard messages anytime soon.

STANK LOVE
SWEAT POO
LOVE 2000 HOGSYEA
HOLE
HOW U HOT
YOU ARE BOA
CHERT FACE
LICK
SWEAT PEAR
LOO GIN
YOU A GOO
LOOK BIG
YOU ARE BAG
U HACK

There was yet another category of message, a category you might be able to predict given the prevalence of four-letter words in the original dataset. The neural network thought of some nice new four-letter words to use. Unfortunately, some of those words already had other meanings. Let’s just say that the overall effect was surprisingly suggestive. Fill out the form here and I’ll send them to you.

Also, if you need more love help from the neural network, check out the pick up lines it wrote.

Heart pictures made using https://cryptogram.com/hearts/

UPDATE: MORE HEARTS!