Some of you might remember how obsessed I am with Paintschainer, the coloring AI. Well, recently I stumbled on an AI called Artbreeder that lets you mix images together and fine-tune them by editing their "genes." I did a little reading on Artbreeder and I'm still not entirely sure where some of the creeptastic images it spits-out come from. Like this camel for instance:
If I'm understanding things correctly, this is what a robot thinks a camel looks like. The image doesn't originate from some weirdo uploading an image and modifying it through one of the various and sundry gene editing modes (flag pole gene, anyone?). I really hope I'm wrong and for God's sake, don't look up the gene Sorrel. I still can't figure out what animal that's supposed to be, but it haunts my dreams.
Of course, I decided to contribute to this AI's misunderstanding of the world by uploading close-ups of flowers in the "Portraits" section. It said that you had to be able to see a face in the image, so I thought there was a good chance my images would be rejected.
Not only was I wrong. I was fascinatingly and gloriously wrong:
In a very human-like fashion, the AI was seeing faces where there were no faces. A little tweaking and this emerged:
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| Let's call her Flora. |
After that, I just had to try a rose:
A lot of it is senseless fun. For example, I discovered that if you breed some of the most terrifying portraits together, they turn into a perfectly normal human that you wouldn't be afraid of sitting next to on the bus standing six feet away from while wearing a mask.
And then you bump into things like this:
Oh, yes. I forgot. The robots are coming and they think we look like that. No wonder they want to subjugate us.