Steer the hallucinations of a neural net
June 28, 2015 1:48 PM   Subscribe

Watch a Large Scale Deep neural net hallucinate while onlookers supply topics in a chat room. Almost magically, after a few seconds the psychedelic representations of those suggestions begin creeping out of the woodwork into which you infinitely zoom. Jonas Degrave writes about how the thing came to be on his blog. Previously.
posted by smcameron (23 comments total) 42 users marked this as a favorite
 
Are we forcing an AI to have nightmares?

Also, some background music.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 1:58 PM on June 28, 2015 [1 favorite]


Are we forcing an AI to have nightmares?

When the neural nets take over the world, this channel will be listed as the first of our crimes to be punished for.
posted by eykal at 1:59 PM on June 28, 2015 [4 favorites]


Are we forcing an AI to have nightmares?

No, this is only nightmarish from a human perspective. From the machine's perspective, we're just showing it photos and asking what it sees. The fact that we find the results terrifying is on us, not it.
posted by Itaxpica at 2:09 PM on June 28, 2015 [6 favorites]


Earlier this week the network was set up to take single keywords, now they can also accept word pairs (e.g. balloon + quilt) which is even more interesting. It also appears it has been sped up a bit more.

That said, this is amazing to watch... I'd love to know what /r/trees thinks of it.
posted by JoeZydeco at 2:17 PM on June 28, 2015 [3 favorites]


Idunno... seems to take a bit of the jesus-on-toast sort of vision to see anything relevant there.
posted by fredludd at 2:23 PM on June 28, 2015


The chat is like the polar opposite of what twitch is usually like.
posted by Valued Customer at 2:38 PM on June 28, 2015 [2 favorites]


Idunno... seems to take a bit of the jesus-on-toast sort of vision to see anything relevant there.

You've got it backwards. They're giving the computer the toast and telling it to find jesus.
posted by Nomiconic at 2:42 PM on June 28, 2015 [6 favorites]


My fever dreams are like this.
posted by cropshy at 3:10 PM on June 28, 2015


Gah, it just did "neck brace" and I was looking so hard for the shape of a neck brace to start popping out that the disembodied malformed mouths and nostrils in the associated imagery snuck right the fuck up on me.
posted by cortex at 3:12 PM on June 28, 2015 [5 favorites]


Okay, "ant + broccoli" was pretty cute, but the next one was "neck brace". Aiiieeee. Terrifying.
posted by isthmus at 3:13 PM on June 28, 2015 [1 favorite]


Trilobyte + scorpion is pretty whoa too.
posted by isthmus at 3:36 PM on June 28, 2015


This would make a cool screensaver (if it was 15 years ago and people still used screensavers).
posted by dilaudid at 3:39 PM on June 28, 2015


My mind is going.
posted by popcassady at 4:04 PM on June 28, 2015


I'm finding the neural network hallucination work absolutely fascinating, both because I am clearly hard-wired to do so (history confirms) and that it's almost a direct connection between our deep consciousness and that of the models we are building of mechanisms of thought. Also that my eyesight is broken in a way that means some of the mechanisms of image recognition in my head go wrong in interesting ways from time to time, so yeah. This is relevant to my interests.

It is also, literally, surreal - not in the rather slapdash way the word is used these days, but in the way that the original Surrealists operated. That had an extraordinarily enriching effect on art, because it really did rip the top off and poke around inside, and I rather hope we may see something similar happen here but for concepts and experiences of certain aspects of cognitive science.
posted by Devonian at 4:17 PM on June 28, 2015 [6 favorites]


mind + blown
posted by dazed_one at 5:11 PM on June 28, 2015


Metafilter: The fact that we find the results terrifying is on us, not it.
posted by bonobothegreat at 5:24 PM on June 28, 2015 [4 favorites]


I just saw something I can only describe as "Hieronymus Bosch Descending a Staircase".
posted by bonobothegreat at 5:47 PM on June 28, 2015 [2 favorites]


It stopped! :( it was so cool earlier, especially once I got into that Magic Eye headspace where things were a little blurry and I felt like things were 3D and then I looked in the mirror and saw myself aging and then there were these beautiful towels
posted by oceanjesse at 6:09 PM on June 28, 2015 [5 favorites]


Devonian, oceanjesse: what sets this twitch feed apart for me is the frame interpolation they mention. There are features which the interpolator interprets and renders as being 3D, which make the feed much more interesting to watch than just the convnet iterations used as keyframes.

Short-term, this is going to result in some amazing generative art as people start applying tone-mapping and other effects to the keyframes before feeding them directly back into the neural net. The second link mentions their doing this to some extent already.

Long-term, and at the cost of doubling their big-O complexity, the neural net could be made to work on dynamic, instead of static images. These contain depth information, and the resulting net will much more closely emulate actual human vision. That's exciting, and terrifying.
posted by 7segment at 6:31 PM on June 28, 2015 [2 favorites]


Some trippy shit.
posted by ottereroticist at 6:37 PM on June 28, 2015 [1 favorite]


genitals + genitals
Genitals + Genitals
GENITALS + GENITALS
posted by FatherDagon at 11:15 AM on June 29, 2015


chris urmson, head of google's driverless car program, on how a driverless car sees the road: "We do three million miles of testing in our simulators every single day, so you can imagine the experience that our vehicles have."
posted by kliuless at 2:34 PM on June 30, 2015 [1 favorite]




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