AI Weirdness: the strange side of machine learning

Tag: neural networks

Total 304 Posts
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Welcome to Word Vector Space On this blog I’ve posted a lot about neural networks and other machine learning algorithms. Unlike other kinds of computer programs, they don’t rely on step by step instructions from a programmer - instead, they’re given a goal, like a score to

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H.M.S. Neural Net One of my favorite things to do with machine learning algorithms is to get them to name things. Give a neural network (a type of machine learning algorithm) enough examples, and it will do an often decent (sometimes howlingly bad) imitation of their letter combinations
D&D character bios - now making slightly more sense!

D&D character bios - now making slightly more sense!

I like training neural networks to generate Dungeons and Dragons stuff because, well, the results are really really weird. To date I’ve generated spells [http://aiweirdness.com/post/165373096197/a-neural-network-learns-to-create-better-dd] , creatures [http://aiweirdness.com/post/172170729017/dungeons-and-dragons-creatures-generated-by] , and character names [http://aiweirdness.com/post/173546448332/dd-character-names-generated-by-a-neural] , thanks to readers
How a neural net makes cookies

How a neural net makes cookies

The other day I trained a neural net to generate the names of cookies [http://aiweirdness.com/post/180892528177/aw-yeah-its-time-for-cookies-with-neural-networks] , based on about 1,000 existing recipes. The resulting names (Quitterbread Bars, Hand Buttersacks, Low Fuzzy Feats, and more) were both delightfully weird and strangely plausible. People even invented delicious
A neural net designed some comics for you

A neural net designed some comics for you

It is quite fitting that the idea to train a neural net to generate comics names came from the creator of a webcomic about a hapless AI robot [http://LABScomic.com]. Aaron Uglum collected 1,417 names of newspaper comics from Wikipedia, and I gave them to textgenrnn to see
GPT-2: It learned on the Internet

GPT-2: It learned on the Internet

> Prompt: The black-capped chickadee is a small songbird native to Response: The black-capped chickadee is a small songbird native to Africa that is powerfully seductive. In the songs of Barry Sequson, Harry Holness and Alan Emerson the black-capped chickadee competes with others—and climbs on top of each other
GANCats

GANCats

A new paper from NVIDIA recently made waves with its photorealistic human portraits. Called StyleGAN [https://github.com/NVlabs/stylegan], the algorithm had a new training dataset pulled from Flickr, with a wider range of ages and skin tones than in other portrait datasets. (If your pictures are on Flickr
What do neural nets dream of?

What do neural nets dream of?

Dreams are really weird, when you think about them. Let’s lie still for several hours and maybe vividly hallucinate? A lot of what people call AI these days are algorithms called artificial neural networks, a type of algorithm that’s modeled after the human brain. They have some things
Welcome to Latent Space

Welcome to Latent Space

I’ve written before about BigGAN [http://aiweirdness.com/post/178619746932/imaginary-worlds-dreamed-by-biggan], an image-generating neural net that Google trained recently. It generates its best images for each of the 1,000 different categories [https://gist.github.com/yrevar/942d3a0ac09ec9e5eb3a] in the standard ImageNet dataset, from goldfish to planetarium to toilet
What the machines will debate when the humans are gone

What the machines will debate when the humans are gone

In 2018, IBM introduced “IBM Debater, [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/18/technology/ibm-debater-artificial-intelligence.html] ” a machine learning algorithm whose goal was to argue with humans. Rather than a free-for-all argument (which the AI would win using the same techniques as a tireless two-year-old [https://twitter.com/JanelleCShane/status/
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