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.

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

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

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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.

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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.

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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

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!

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