sentientcitizen:

mirkokosmos:

Yes, Androids DO dream of Electric Sheep

Google sets up feedback loop in its image recognition neural network –
which looks for patterns in pictures – creating hallucinatory images of
animals, buildings and landscapes which veer from beautiful to
terrifying.

What do machines dream of? New images released by Google give us one potential answer: hypnotic landscapes of buildings, fountains and bridges merging into one.

The pictures, which veer from beautiful to terrifying, were created by the company’s image recognition neural network, which has been “taught” to identify features such as buildings, animals and objects in photographs.

They were created by feeding a picture into the network, asking it to
recognise a feature of it, and modify the picture to emphasise the
feature it recognises. That modified picture is then fed back into the
network, which is again tasked to recognise features and emphasise them,
and so on. Eventually, the feedback loop modifies the picture beyond
all recognition.

[…]

The pictures are stunning, but they’re more than just for show.
Neural networks are a common feature of machine learning: rather than
explicitly programme a computer so that it knows how to recognise an
image, the company feeds it images and lets it piece together the key
features itself.

[…]

The image recognition software has already made it into consumer
products. Google’s new photo service, Google Photos, features the option
to search images with text: entering “dog”, for instance, will pull out
every image Google can find which has a dog in it [and occasionally
images with other quadrupedal mammals, as well].

So there you have it: Androids don’t just dream of electric sheep; they also dream of mesmerising, multicoloured landscapes.

Go look at all the pictures, they’re lovely and uncanny