Machines Dream of Insectoid Sheep

google sheep

Google’s artificial neural network is having some seriously weird dreams.

These images are all created through Google’s image recognition neural network, taught to identify things such as buildings and animals in photographs. Then the program is asked to modify the image to emphasize the feature. At a low level, the end result looks like a simple photoshop filter. At a higher level, where the image is fed back into the network again and again, the effect looks like a visual acid trip.

Google has since made its #DeepDream code available to the public. Check out the hashtag on Twitter/Instagram to never sleep again: Gizmodo’s collected a series of its favourites. Or go make your own android trip. From Google:

Google has spent the last few years teaching computers how to see, understand, and appreciate our world. It’s an important goal that the search giant hopes will allow programs to classify images just by “looking” at them. And this is where Google’s deep dream ideas originate. With simple words you give to an AI program a couple of images and let it know what those images contain ( what objects – dogs, cats, mountains, bicycles, … ) and give it a random image and ask it what objects it can find in this image. Then the program start transforming the image till it can find something similar to what it already knows and thus you see strange artifacts morphing in the dreamed image ( like eyes or human faces morphing in image of a pyramid ).

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