Janelle Shane

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 Facebook

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

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

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

New insect species, dreamed by neural network

By Janelle Shane On February 01, 2018 - 3 min read

Neural networks are a kind of machine learning program that imitate the way the human brain learns. They learn by example, rather than by being given rules by a human programmer. And because they can get very, very good at what they do, neural networks are now the algorithms that

You are Wrong about Music, according to this neural network

By Janelle Shane On January 26, 2018 - 1 min read

I train computer programs called neural networks, which look at datasets of human things and try to copy them. They’re used for all sorts of important real-life applications, running Facebook’s facial recognition and Google’s language translation, among many, many other things. I am running the same

New bills introduced by neural network

By Janelle Shane On January 18, 2018 - 2 min read

Between 2009 and 2017, approximately 18,458 unique bills were introduced to the legislature of Massachusetts (out of 33,201 total). I know this because Dru Tarr [https://twitter.com/DruTarr], a legislative aide at the Massachusetts House of Representatives, very kindly compiled the publicly available list of bills [https:

Thesis titles generated by neural network

By Janelle Shane On January 11, 2018 - 4 min read

Ever notice that sometimes the neural networks on this blog do a better job of imitating weird datasets than at other times? Here are two major things that affect how convincing a neural network version will be: 1. Amount of data vs complexity of the problem 2. How easy the

Wikipedia articles invented by a neural network

By Janelle Shane On January 04, 2018 - 2 min read

Wikipedia has a page where they list [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deleted_articles_with_freaky_titles], for entertainment purposes, the titles of a bunch of pages that didn’t meet the cut. These are mostly pages that were submitted as pranks, although a few of them are clever

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

New insect species, dreamed by neural network

You are Wrong about Music, according to this neural network

New bills introduced by neural network

Thesis titles generated by neural network

Wikipedia articles invented by a neural network

Writing

Subscribe

Recent Posts

It's 11:00 pm. Do you know where your AI agent is?

Get working on your April Fools Eiffel Tower

Bonus: More April Fools pranks from Eiffel Tower Llama

When a chatbot runs your store

Bonus: Incorrect Christmas Carols

Tiny neural net Halloween costumes are the best

Follow

It's 11:00 pm. Do you know where your AI agent is?

Get working on your April Fools Eiffel Tower

Bonus: More April Fools pranks from Eiffel Tower Llama