I did one of these for 2017 last year, so I thought it would be fun to recap some of my favorite aiweirdness.com experiments from 2018. Sure, financial forecasting, facial recognition, and delivering ads may be the most common uses for machine learning, but that doesn’t mean they’re the best uses.
FOOD
To me, this never gets old. Give a neural net a list of recipes and ask it to imitate them, and the resulting creations become a sort of surrealist performance art.
Generating cookies was an even easier task than cocktail recipes and ice cream flavors because the neural network didn’t even have to learn to generate real words. People ended up baking their own interpretations of many of these, and they were much better than anything the neural net could have come up with on its own. Human/AI partnership – AI still needs humans to actually make the cookies!
A project called SkyKnit had a neural network attempt to reproduce knitting patterns. Human knitters translated the resulting very strange instructions into actual knitted objects. The fewer of SkyKnit’s mistakes they fixed during debugging, the weirder the knitting became.
Speaking of romance, I had a go at naming a new burlesque show with a neural net as well. The resulting post, “AI Does Not Understand Sexy” was temporarily (and ironically) censored by Tumblr as containing adult material. The first neural net-named burlesque show, “My Rear’s On The Sexy” played to a sold-out house.
My 2017 Farty Burlesque Adventure Sex Your Eye Out! Gourdraiser! The Stripper Stripper Dave Burlesque Show The Pants of Fame Burlesque Adventure
Joke-telling is one of those few areas where science fiction has it right about AI - neural networks do indeed have a tough time with humor. I trained a neural net on about 43,000 jokes and the resulting joke-shaped but not joke-containing things reminded many people of the jokes that five-year-olds tell.
How many engineers does it take to change a light bulb? A star an alligator and because they are bees.
What do you get when you cross a pirate and a little butter? A bathroom.
Why do seagulls fly over the sea? Because they know …………..
A neural net’s pranks are the kind that people will never expect, and will never understand.
Put marbles in the refrigerator. Place a pair of pants and shoes in your ice dispenser. Putting googly eyes on someone’s computer mouse so that it won’t work. Put marbles in the hand soap dispenser.
When the neural net gets tired of wowing us with its culinary masterpieces and instead turns toward world domination, at least the name of its elite strike force will be interesting, judging by the names it suggested for these high school robotics teams.
Bonus: planning to bake more this year? Start things out right with this recipe for Sugar Favorites. For this recipe (plus optional bonus material every time I post), enter your email here.
interrogation scene in a movey where the guy refuses to cooperate and he’s like “fuck you” and spits blood and the people interrogating him are like “what the fuck. nobody’s even hit you yet. where did you get all that blood from”
tumblr sucked yet its the only thing people like us could ever have posted on. tumblr was a deep sea geothermal vent and we are all pallid, desperate crabs snapping at the dark toxcic nutrients spweing from its hole, and bringing us into the harsh light of the instagram influencersphere would kill us instantly.
