char-rnn - AI Weirdness

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 Utah

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 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 Chocolate Chicken Chicken Cake?). Later when

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, craft beers, cats, and even guinea pigs. The weirder the starting set of names, the more a neural network’s creations might blend in (although cats named “Jexley Pickle” and “Big Wiggy Bool” might at least

(Untitled)

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

H.M.S. Neural NetOne 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 and

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, 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 recipes for them. But given that

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, 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

Perfectly normal shopping malls, named by neural network

By Janelle Shane On August 31, 2018 - 3 min read

The names of American shopping malls are a carefully calculated combination of bland and grandiose. Even the plainest of strip malls will have a faded sign somewhere proclaiming it to be the “Westbrook Manor Shoppes at Town Center Mall” or something of that nature. What happens if a machine learning

A neural net tries writing Burma-Shave jingles

By Janelle Shane On July 19, 2018 - 2 min read

Will machine learning algorithms be writing commercials soon? A familiar sight on US roads from 1926-1963 were a series of red billboards advertising Burma-Shave. Each billboard would contain a snippet of a jingle, and the last one always read “Burma-Shave”. There were about 600 different messages printed over the years,

AI does not understand “sexy”

By Janelle Shane On July 13, 2018 - 3 min read

Machine learning algorithms can uncover complex patterns in the data they see, making them useful for image recognition, predicting customer service questions, or recommending movies. They can even do a decent job at naming craft beers, kittens, or guinea pigs. But one thing it turns out they’re bad at?

Tag: char-rnn

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

Perfectly normal shopping malls, named by neural network

A neural net tries writing Burma-Shave jingles

AI does not understand “sexy”

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