Remember when Google announced, probably from within a heavily fortified and Skynet-proof bunker, that its artificial neural networks were “dreaming”? And then we saw the above picture of a squirrel ravaged by a computer’s best and most terrifying guesses at what things look like, and we all peed a little?
Well, the company has released that code to the public, and now some Scarecrow-esque villain has provided us with Dreamscope, a way to turn your beloved pictures into extensions of a neurotic computer’s twisted psyche.
The web app is pretty easy to use: You just go to Dreamscope’s site, upload a picture, and then select one of the 19 filters to make the magic happen. Three of the options are locked behind a registration wall, but you have enough to haunt your dreams for weeks with the immediately available options.
I ran one photo through a bunch of different filters, which have benign names like “Art Deco” and eyebrow-raising ones like “Self-Transforming Machine Elves.” You can see my results below (the original image is in the upper-left).
Google Research revealed its “Deep Dream” findings last month, which are a side-effect of an attempt to teach computers how to identify objects. According to Google engineer Alexander Mordvintsev,
We train an artificial neural network by showing it millions of training examples and gradually adjusting the network parameters until it gives the classifications we want. The network typically consists of 10-30 stacked layers of artificial neurons. Each image is fed into the input layer, which then talks to the next layer, until eventually the “output” layer is reached. The network’s “answer” comes from this final output layer.
By reversing this process, the computer can also generate images, but it has a lot of quirks. For example, it couldn’t draw a “dumbbell” without also throwing in a muscular arm or two. And then there’s that matter of the squirrel that is apparently also a snail and a hippopotamus, like we interrupted the alien from John Carpenter’s The Thing while it was in the middle of transforming.
Dreamscope is only on the web right now, but its Facebook page promises (or maybe threatens) that a mobile version will arrive next week.