Janelle Shane

Neural network-named tomatoes you won’t find at the farmer’s market

By Janelle Shane On April 05, 2018 - 3 min read

As gardeners know, a tomato is not just a tomato. They come in all shapes, sizes, and especially colors, from tiny red gems to big and purplish brown to pear-shaped with zebra stripes. And their tastes and textures vary wildly as well, with some sweet and soft, some tough-skinned and

April Fool’s pranks written by neural network

By Janelle Shane On March 28, 2018 - 2 min read

On April 1, people play pranks on one another, and a well-designed hilarious-but-harmless prank is a true work of art. There are lists of pranks online for inspiration, but there are only so many of these, and what do you do if your target has already read the same lists?

Dungeons and Dragons creatures, generated by neural network

By Janelle Shane On March 23, 2018 - 2 min read

The game Dungeons and Dragons has all sorts of lists of spells and abilities you can use for gameplay. I trained an algorithm called a recurrent neural network [https://github.com/karpathy/char-rnn] to generate more spells - like Barking Sphere, Hold Mouse, and Gland Growth [http://aiweirdness.com/post/

When computers generate traditional Irish music

By Janelle Shane On March 16, 2018 - 5 min read

There is something unusual about the following set of Irish tunes. (played by Eimear McGeown, Daren Banarsë and Rob Webb [https://theconversation.com/machine-folk-music-composed-by-ai-shows-technologys-creative-side-74708] ) The first tune is called The Rookery [https://thesession.org/tunes/2958] and the third tune is called Toss the Feathers [https://thesession.org/tunes/113]

The Bands of South by Southwest, interpreted by neural net

By Janelle Shane On March 11, 2018 - 2 min read

Neural networks are widely used for image recognition [http://aiweirdness.com/post/171451900302/do-neural-nets-dream-of-electric-sheep] , language translation, finance modeling, and even medicine. They learn by example - give them a dataset and, using trial-and-error guessing, they’ll try to figure out the rules that make these datasets work. In addition to

A neural network tries to generate townlands of Ireland

By Janelle Shane On March 08, 2018 - 2 min read

There’s a type of machine learning algorithm called a neural network, which learns to imitate the patterns it finds in datasets. When I’ve trained neural networks on names in English, they learn to match the sounds that make a word sound like a guinea pig name, or a

Do neural nets dream of electric sheep?

By Janelle Shane On March 02, 2018 - 3 min read

If you’ve been on the internet today, you’ve probably interacted with a neural network. They’re a type of machine learning algorithm that’s used for everything from language translation to finance modeling. One of their specialties is image recognition. Several companies - including Google, Microsoft, IBM, and

New ways to market your self-affirmation talk, thanks to a neural network

By Janelle Shane On February 23, 2018 - 3 min read

There’s a self-affirmation talk on Spotify where a voice says things like “I am confident” over a synthesized choir. It has been rather vigorously marketed, not just for general self-confidence skills, but also under titles like: > I Will Win the Lottery I Will Improve My Meteorology Skills Attract

More candy hearts by neural network

By Janelle Shane On February 12, 2018 - 2 min read

Last week I trained a neural network to generate new messages for candy hearts. [http://aiweirdness.com/post/170685749687/candy-heart-messages-written-by-a-neural-network] They were, well, unique. My training data was really small, though - I could only find about 360 existing messages total. So, when I decided to generate some more messages,

Candy Heart messages written by a neural network

By Janelle Shane On February 09, 2018 - 2 min read

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

Neural network-named tomatoes you won’t find at the farmer’s market

April Fool’s pranks written by neural network

Dungeons and Dragons creatures, generated by neural network

When computers generate traditional Irish music

The Bands of South by Southwest, interpreted by neural net

A neural network tries to generate townlands of Ireland

Do neural nets dream of electric sheep?

New ways to market your self-affirmation talk, thanks to a neural network

More candy hearts by neural network

Candy Heart messages written by a neural network

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