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There was a paper recently where a research team trained a machine learning algorithm (a GAN they called AttnGAN) to generate pictures based on written descriptions. It’s like Visual Chatbot in reverse. When it was just trained to generate pictures of birds, it did pretty well, actually.
I generally am uninterested in generative AI that's too close to the real thing. But every once in a while there's a modern AI thing that's so glitchy and broken that it's strangely compelling. There's this generative AI knockoff of Minecraft that fails so hard
Once upon a time I decided to train a neural net to generate pickup lines. Once I started collecting the training data I began to regret it when I saw how awful the existing lines were. Turns out I needn’t have worried. The neural net I used was so small and clueless that
Last year for National Novel Writing Month I trained a neural net called torch-rnn on 10,096 unique ways to begin a novel. It came up with some intriguing possibilities, my personal favorite being “I am forced to write to my neighbors about the beast.” But many of its sentences used made-up words, or had such weird…
Machine learning algorithms are not like other computer programs. In the usual sort of programming, a human programmer tells the computer exactly what to do. In machine learning, the human programmer merely gives the algorithm the problem to be solved, and through trial-and-error the algorithm has to figure out how to…
I’ve done several experiments with a text-generating neural network called GPT-2. Trained at great expense by OpenAI (to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars worth of computing power), GPT-2 learned to imitate all kinds of text from the internet. I’ve interacted with the basic model, discovering its abilities to…
If you’ve been on the internet today, you’ve probably interacted with a neural network. They’re a type of machine learning algorithm that’s used for everything from language translation to finance modeling. One of their specialties is image recognition. Several companies - including Google, Microsoft, IBM, and…
I wrote earlier about a neural net-powered dungeon crawling text adventure game called GPT-2-Adventure in which gameplay is incoherent and dreamlike, as you encounter slippery sign text, circular passages, and unexpected lozenge rooms. A PhD student named Nathan trained the neural net on classic dungeon crawling…
Neural networks can be good at naming things, I’ve discovered. Recently I’ve been experimenting with a neural network called GPT-2, which OpenAI trained on a huge chunk of the internet. Thanks to a colab notebook implementation by Max Woolf, I’m able to fine-tune it on specific lists of data -
These are some of the most amazing generated images I’ve ever seen. Introducing BigGAN, a neural network that generates high-resolution, sometimes photorealistic, imitations of photos it’s seen. None of the images below are real - they’re all generated by BigGAN.