“Edge Cases” is a new series from The Believer featuring short interviews with artists and creatives who work with technology.
For years I’ve followed Colorado-based research scientist Janelle Shane’s adventures with artificial intelligence on Twitter and her aptly titled blog AI Weirdness. Working with everything from My Little Pony names to cookie recipes to knitting designs, Janelle dissects and explains how neural networks and algorithms actually work, all while generating the absurd and humorous. Her new book You Look Like A Thing And I Love You: How AI Works And Why It’s Making The World A Weirder Place was released this past November.
—Maxwell Neely-Cohen
THE BELIEVER: How would you describe what you do to a kindergarten class?
What I do is I use computers to write really weird interesting things. I give the computer something that it’s supposed to try to copy, but because this computer program can’t really understand what it is I’ve given it, it tends to make mistakes as it’s trying to figure out what is going on. But the mistakes are often really funny and interesting, and give me a window into how this computer sees the world, what a program knows and definitely does not know. So the mistakes are actually the fun part. They’re what I look for and they are where I find the stories.
I trained a neural network on 1,228 types of cookies and apparently these are what cookies sound like to it.https://t.co/YS8vbgWiyz pic.twitter.com/ommtYtAMAs
— Janelle Shane (@JanelleCShane) December 7, 2018
BLVR: This is just me going from memory, but you’ve trained neural networks on Recipes, Cocktails, Pies, naming Cats, Pick Up Lines, cookies, first sentences of novels, to name a few. Do you have favorites?
JS: You know my favorite ones are the ones that end up engaging a community of creative humans in some way. Most recently that was the Inktober prompts. If you’re not familiar, in October artist Jake Parker puts out a list of drawing prompts, and artists all over the world do a drawing a day. So I generated some really weird ones with AI and then I just posted them on my blog, and then discovered so many people who had never heard of me before were drawing them. They are fantastic, weird, funny, otherworldly, disturbing. It was amazing to see what all the different interpretations they could have of the phrase “take control of ostrich” for example, or “two block squishy”.
SkyKnit: when knitters teamed up with a neural networkhttps://t.co/HMDkMF7Te1 pic.twitter.com/wd2F9J9Glh
— Janelle Shane (@JanelleCShane) April 19, 2018
Another experiment...
You have reached your article limit
Sign up for a digital subscription and continue reading all new issues, plus our entire archives, for just $1.50/month.
Already a subscriber? Sign in
