Category: The Gauntlet: Hail Satan

Do androids dream of electric sheep-fish-shrew-dog-birds?

Yeah, pretty much.

Google has been experimenting with neural net image recognition, wherein they train a sort of limited digital brain how to recognize, say, a banana in an image.  The best way to do this is to show it a bazillion images of bananas.  And a good way to test whether or not this process is working is to tell the neural net to take an input of random visual noise and iteratively alter it so that it gradually starts resembling its idea of “banana.”  This tends to work at least well enough so that you or I could recognize what it’s going for, as if we were looking at a banana through a kaleidoscope.

Then the compu-folks tell the network to pick out specific things it’s programmed to identify and enhance them in a source image.  So a simple thing like looking for and bringing out curves or angles results in a recognizable but stylized version of the original image.  The real fun begins when the network enhances higher-level things it can recognize, like animals or gardens or buildings or what looks kind of like a bowling alley.  Inevitably, it starts to insert these things where they aren’t at all.  This, combined with the net’s lack of clarity on where, for instance, a bird ends and a dog begins, leads up to images like the hilariously surreal one of what the computer sees in cloud formations.

Perhaps most impressive are the “dream” images generated whole-cloth from white noise, but resulting in mountainous pagoda towers, never-ending garden pathways, and even stranger vistas.

The artistic neural net output ranges from H.R. Giger psychedelia to Heironymous Bosch demons to monkey-boys on cars to probably what a shoggoth would look like in real life.

So many eyes.

I bring this to you because it’s both fascinating and gameable.  What does the scenery look like in a game set in Tynes-ian/Delta Green Carcosa?  Why, it looks like this picture of a never-ending building façade, archways and windows into infinity.  There’s a purple pagoda/mountain scene that has to be a photograph of Lovecraft’s Dreamlands or something.  And I’m pretty sure I see a picture of some mnemosites floating above Seattle.

Or you could always just use it as a source for bizarre fantasy creatures.  “The terrible screech/howl noises have clearly been coming from this:”  Holds up a picture of a shrew-bird-fish-seal.

I just wish they sold prints.  I’d absolutely buy some of these images.  I’d stare at them, unnerved and inspired in equal measure.