AI Weirdness

Generated ice cream flavors: now it’s my turn

Last week, I featured new ice cream flavors generated by Ms. Johnson’s coding classes at Kealing Middle School in Austin, Texas. Their flavors were good - much better than mine, in fact. In part, this was because they had collected a much larger dataset than I had, and in part this was because they hadn’t accidentally mixed the dataset with metal bands.

(the three at the bottom were mine)

But not only are Ms. Johnson’s coding class adept with textgenrnn, they’re also generous - and they kindly gave me their dataset of 1,600 ice cream flavors. They wanted to see what I would come up with.

So, I fired up char-rnn, a neural network framework I’ve used for a lot of my text-generating experiments - one that starts from scratch each time, with no memory of its previous dataset. There was no chance of getting metal band names in my ice cream this time.

But even so, I ended up with some rather edgy-sounding flavors. There was a flavor in the input dataset called Death by Chocolate, and I blame blood oranges for some of the rest, but “nose” was nowhere in the input, candied or otherwise. Nor was “turd”, for that matter. Ice cream places are getting edgy these days, but not THAT edgy.

Bloodie Chunk
Death Bean
Goat Cookie
Peanut Bat
Bubblegum Cheesecake
Rawe Blueberry Fist
Candied Nose
Creme die
Mucki
Ant Cone
Apple Pistachio mouth
Chocolate Moose Mange
Dime Oil
Live Cookie
Bubblegum Chocolate Basil Aspresso
Lime Pig
Beet Bats
Blood Sundae
Elterfhawe Monkey But
Kaharon Chocolate Mouse Gun
Gu Creamie Turd

Not all the flavors were awful, though. The neural network actually did a decent job of coming up with trendy-sounding ice cream flavors. I haven’t seen these before, but I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if I did someday.

Smoked Butter
Lemon-Oreo
Bourbon Oil
Strawberry Churro
Roasted Beet Pecans
Cherry Chai
Grazed Oil
Green Tea Coconut
Root Beet Peaches
Malted Black Madnesss
Chocolate With Ginger Lime and Oreo
Pumpkin Pomegranate Chocolate Bar
Smoked Cocoa Nibe
Carrot Beer
Red Honey
Candied Butter
Lime Cardamom
Potato Chocolate Roasted
Praline Cheddar Swirl
Toasted Basil
Burnt Basil
Beet Bourbon
Black Corn
Chocolate Oreo Oil + Toffee
Milky Ginger Chocolate Peppercorn
Cookies & Oreo
Caramel Chocolate Toasted Strawberry
Mountain Fig n Strawberry Twist
Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Road
Chocolate Peanut Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate
Japanese Cookies n'Cream with Roasted Strawberry Coconut

These next flavors seem unlikely, however.

Mann Beans
Cherry Law
Rhubarb Cram
Spocky Parstita
Green Tea Cogbat
Cheesecake With Bear
Peanut Butter Cookies nut Butter Brece Toasterbrain Blueberry Rose
The Gone Butter Fish Fleek Red Vanill
Mounds of Jay
Roasted Monster Dream
Sweet Chocolate Mouse
Cookies nutur Coconut Chocolate Fish
Froggtow
Tie Pond
Cookies naw
Mocoa Pistachoopie
Garl And Cookie Doug
Burble With Berry Cake
Peachy Bunch Kissionfruit
Bearhounds
Gropky Pum
Stuck Brownie
Vanilla Salted Blueberry Bumpa
Thyme Mountain Bluckled Bananas
Lemon-Blueberry Almernuts
Gone Cream with Rap Chocolate
Cocoa Named Honey