There’s a kind of neural network that learns to imitate whatever text you give it, whether that’s recipes, song lyrics, or even the names of guinea pigs.

Their imitations are often imperfect (they only know what’s in their dataset and therefore end up accidentally coming up with things that they don’t know are bad ideas). But one area where they tend to do well is inventing new species of things. The neural net’s birds were entirely believable, and its fish were generally no stranger than the species that already exist. So for my next project, I decided to generate some snakes.

I collected English common names for about 1,000 snakes and started training.

The first thing I noticed is that its snake names were a lot more noticeably fake than its birds or fish - the snake dataset is way smaller, so it had much fewer examples to learn from.

Tostlesnake
Sine cobra
Snoked snake
Cancan rattlesnake
Chippen’s putter python
Southern coat snake
Pinkwarm’s Copperanada
Smart sea snake
Western Nack
Blonded snake
Ham’s Pattlescops
Green tree nosh Snake
Hecker’s sea snake
Ned-scaled tree viper
Barned dater Snake
Smalle’s mock ractlesnake
Bland brown snake
Corned python
Common bust viper
Smorthead Garter Snake

Some snakes did approach the level of believability. You might be able to bluff some herpetologists into thinking these are real.

Many-nosed Snake
Cornhead snake
Arizona liger snake
Mangbow’s Earth Snake
Wing snake
Banded gutter snake
Jacucan balm snake
Banded guff adder
Bamboo tire snake
Rave hognose Snake
Tree-nosed adder
Bland-headed tree snake

Good luck with these, though.

image
Texan farter snake
Shite snake
Spitty rattlesnake
Thing snake
Brown brown Black Snake
Tamestail farter Snake
Black-neded tampon
Madeshine spite- racer
Bognia scat snake

I also decided to see what would happen if I trained a neural net both on snakes AND on Halloween costumes. Pleasingly, here are some of the snakes it came up with:

Wonder snake
Fairy rattlesnake
The Spacer Snake
Robo snake
Sexy cobra
Bob dog tree Snake

I had way too much fun generating those, and ended up generating more than would fit here. If you’d like to read the rest of them, become an AI Weirdness supporter!

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