char-rnn - AI Weirdness

The Skypug; Hungry Boats; Mid wonka; Burderous bread cat; Holy Cheesarenda; Moth fairy; A magicial slice; Fall wearing monster; The Godfish

Halloween costumes by tiny neural net

By Janelle Shane On October 17, 2025 - 2 min read

I've recently been experimenting with one of my favorite old-school neural networks, a tiny program that runs on my laptop and knows only about the data I give it. Without internet training, char-rnn doesn't have outside references to draw on (for better or for worse) but

Botober 2025: Terrible recipes from a tiny neural net

By Janelle Shane On September 30, 2025 - 2 min read

After seeing generated text evolve from the days of tiny neural networks to today's ChatGPT-style large language models, I have to conclude: there's something special about the tiny guys. Maybe it's the way the tiny neural networks string together text letter by letter just

Drawing prompts for Botober - follow link to see full alt text!

Botober 2024

By Janelle Shane On September 30, 2024 - 1 min read

Back by popular demand, here are some AI-generated drawing prompts to use in this, the spooky month of October! Longtime AI Weirdness readers may recognize some of these. That's because this is a throwback list, all the way back to the times of very tiny language models. These

2020 Headlines

By Janelle Shane On December 16, 2020 - 4 min read

Midway through 2020, people started suggesting that I train a neural net on 2020 headlines, and I was skeptical that there would be enough weird ones to make a decent project. Then 2020 continued to be 2020. We started to get headlines such as: > Mysterious alien-like monolith discovered in

A big neural net reviews a smaller neural net's recipes

By Janelle Shane On December 02, 2020 - 5 min read

I’ve used various neural networks to generate recipes, to varying degrees of success. My earliest [https://aiweirdness.com/post/163878889437/try-these-neural-network-generated-recipes-at-your] recipes were generated with char-rnn, which had to learn everything - spelling, punctuation, words - entirely from scratch. Its recipes were terrible (Swamp Peef and Cheese, anyone? Or

A neural net names racehorses

By Janelle Shane On May 03, 2019 - 2 min read

I’ve used neural networks to name all kinds of things - halloween costumes [http://aiweirdness.com/post/179461774272/its-neural-net-halloween-costume-time] , craft beers [http://aiweirdness.com/post/166075083502/trendy-beer-names-invented-by-neural-network] , cats [http://aiweirdness.com/post/162396324452/neural-networks-kittens], and even guinea pigs [http://aiweirdness.com/post/162263942282/more-neural-network-guinea-pig-names]. The weirder the starting set

(Untitled)

By Janelle Shane On March 21, 2019 - 1 min read

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

How a neural net makes cookies

By Janelle Shane On March 01, 2019 - 3 min read

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

Don’t let a neural net mix drinks.

By Janelle Shane On December 14, 2018 - 3 min read

So I’ve used neural networks to generate recipes in the past. They’re computer programs that can learn to imitate the data we give them, copying the way that humans drive cars, label images, or translate languages. That is, they try to learn. They’re called “neural” because they

New neural net snakes

By Janelle Shane On October 12, 2018 - 2 min read

There’s a kind of neural network that learns to imitate whatever text you give it, whether that’s recipes [http://aiweirdness.com/tagged/recipes], song lyrics [http://aiweirdness.com/post/167596678562/disney-songs-sung-by-a-neural-network-with-a-very] , or even the names of guinea pigs [http://aiweirdness.com/post/162263942282/more-neural-network-guinea-pig-names]. Their imitations are often

Tag: char-rnn

Halloween costumes by tiny neural net

Botober 2025: Terrible recipes from a tiny neural net

Botober 2024

2020 Headlines

A big neural net reviews a smaller neural net's recipes

A neural net names racehorses

(Untitled)

Don’t let a neural net mix drinks.

New neural net snakes

Writing

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Halloween costumes by tiny neural net

Bonus: more halloween costumes from tiny neural net

Botober 2025: Terrible recipes from a tiny neural net

Bonus: Char-rnn's jello creations

ChatGPT will apologize for anything

Revised instructions for troubleshooting the warp confabulator

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Halloween costumes by tiny neural net

Bonus: more halloween costumes from tiny neural net

Botober 2025: Terrible recipes from a tiny neural net