For all your ransom note needs...

September 20, 2013 7:12 AM

Neural network handwriting generation
posted by gwint (35 comments total)

Super neat.
posted by Elementary Penguin at 7:18 AM on September 20, 2013

It hasn't learned its numerals very well yet.
posted by Wolfdog at 7:25 AM on September 20, 2013

I pasted in some Zalgo text and... I think I broke it.
posted by Metroid Baby at 7:25 AM on September 20, 2013 [16 favorites]

Is this your homework, Larry?
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 7:26 AM on September 20, 2013 [6 favorites]

mene mene tekel upharsin
posted by yoink at 7:27 AM on September 20, 2013

This could be mashed together with Twitter very well - to reproduct a twitter stream as a series of hand-written post it notes.
posted by memebake at 7:35 AM on September 20, 2013 [10 favorites]

Huh, that's darned cool.
posted by cortex at 7:39 AM on September 20, 2013

I pasted in some Zalgo text and... I think I broke it.

Yeah putting anything in there that isn't plain typed text makes it flip out, which looks like more fun than what it is supposed to do.
posted by griphus at 7:39 AM on September 20, 2013

The nice thing about RNN's, though, is that it flips out in a way that is fundamentally unlike how a computer would flip out. You could imagine a 3-year-old copying the Zalgo text in a deranged manner that way, couldn't you? But there is nothing in it except basic matrix calculus and linear algebra and statistics.
posted by curuinor at 7:44 AM on September 20, 2013

Input (bias turned all the way up): "I want to rock and roll all night and Ｗａｓｐ Ｅｇｇｓ every day"

Output.

The fail states in this thing are beautiful.
posted by griphus at 7:45 AM on September 20, 2013 [19 favorites]

Huh. That's pretty neat.

So, in the future, even though kids aren't learning longhand, we can still use computers to communicate with old people who know longhand...
posted by rmd1023 at 7:46 AM on September 20, 2013 [8 favorites]

Looks better than my handwriting.
posted by octothorpe at 7:49 AM on September 20, 2013 [2 favorites]

memebake: "This could be mashed together with Twitter very well - to reproduct a twitter stream as a series of hand-written post it notes."

Then ocr it back and retweet.
posted by jquinby at 7:49 AM on September 20, 2013 [6 favorites]

Oh, hey, it can recover from failure. Input was "What is a man? A 惨め little pile of secrets!"
posted by griphus at 7:51 AM on September 20, 2013 [1 favorite]

griphus: "The fail states in this thing are beautiful."

how do you even spell quartz??
posted by boo_radley at 7:55 AM on September 20, 2013 [1 favorite]

griphus: "Oh, hey, it can recover from failure. Input was "What is a man? A 惨め little pile of secrets!""

Wait, "a lithe pile of secrets"? I've known dudes like that.
posted by boo_radley at 7:55 AM on September 20, 2013

I think some of the fail states for weird characters are attempts at writing the HTML character codes. Pasting in ಠ_ಠ gives you this which has some 2's and one 3 I can see on the ends, like a mutant version of the character code for that which is #3232;_#3232; (with ampersands before each hash symbol but that makes MeFi parse it)
posted by jason_steakums at 8:01 AM on September 20, 2013

I tried emoji (🐶🐱), but it returned its default intro message. So spoofing has its limits.
posted by ardgedee at 8:02 AM on September 20, 2013

I replaced 'a's and 'e's in a sentence with Cyrillic 'a's and 'e's (which are visually identical) and it still flipped out so that's something.

The paper is a little dense for me, but if anyone else wants to figure out how the thing is reading text, we can make it do some more interesting things.
posted by griphus at 8:05 AM on September 20, 2013

obligatory
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 8:08 AM on September 20, 2013

Oh, hey, it can recover from failure. Input was "What is a man? A 惨め little pile of secrets!"

Is that an actual script in the output (Hebrew, Armenian or perhaps Thai?) or just noise?
posted by acb at 8:10 AM on September 20, 2013

Could have been helpful for Esptein.
posted by yerfatma at 8:31 AM on September 20, 2013 [1 favorite]

Now pair it with this.
posted by jason_steakums at 8:42 AM on September 20, 2013

cool. now where's the option of getting it to default to my own handwriting (or scrawl as others would put it)?
posted by philip-random at 9:20 AM on September 20, 2013

obligatory

Look. Whan you hear THIS *WHACK*WHACK*WHACK*... it means I'm working!

more slowly than you
posted by Devils Rancher at 9:22 AM on September 20, 2013 [1 favorite]

Obligatory-er
posted by Cookiebastard at 9:23 AM on September 20, 2013

Wow - typed in my name, and the output was almost identical to my own signature.

Maybe I'm a replicant?
posted by Kabanos at 9:26 AM on September 20, 2013

Obligatory-est
posted by moonmilk at 9:30 AM on September 20, 2013 [2 favorites]

A boon for creators of props for tabletop RPGs everywhere!
posted by Zed at 10:14 AM on September 20, 2013 [1 favorite]

It'd be interesting to figure out how to make it forge someone's handwriting or signature.
posted by BrotherCaine at 10:29 AM on September 20, 2013

With Nietzsche, it's strangely apt. [text]
posted by scruss at 11:23 AM on September 20, 2013

Marginally-related anecdote: a few weeks ago, candidates for my city's council races had to submit campaign finance documents, listing individual contributors, date of donation, amounts, etc. Most of the candidates just mailed in a printed copy of an Excel spreadsheet (don't get me started), but there was one who had received a sizable amount of donations and hand-wrote every donation in some kind of illegible chicken-scratch. I couldn't tell if it was a genius way to thwart folks who search for patterns in data, or if their treasurer was being paid by the hour.

Anyway, this is really cool - thanks for sharing.
posted by antonymous at 12:21 PM on September 20, 2013

It really hates the word Question.
posted by msbutah at 12:44 PM on September 20, 2013

It even got the proper emphasis on this one.
posted by limeonaire at 1:57 PM on September 20, 2013

We finally have a replacement for Comic Sans.
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:37 AM on September 21, 2013