![]() ![]() After you’ve created a statistical model that describes your real data, you can also roll the dice and generate new, never-before-seen data of the same kind. The different networks all attempt to model the data they’ve been fed by tuning a vast, funky flowchart. In the tech world, they are now everywhere. Still others are part of what powers Facebook’s News Feed software. Some translate between different languages for Google. ![]() There are many different kinds suited to different sorts of tasks. But it took until the last 10 years or so for the right mix of techniques, data sets, chips, and computing power to transform neural networks into deployable technical tools. The idea of using neural networks to do computer things has been around for decades. The first yarn product of SkyKnit, by the Ravelry user citikas (Ravelry / citikas) Shane nicknamed the whole effort “Project Hilarious Disaster.” The community called it SkyKnit. The user citikas was the first to post a try at one of the earliest patterns, “reverss shawl.” It was strange, but it did have some charisma. The human-machine collaboration created configurations of yarn that you probably wouldn’t give to your in-laws for Christmas, but they were interesting. “The computer would spit out a whole bunch of instructions that I couldn’t read and the knitters would say, this is the funniest thing I’ve ever read.” “The knitting project has been a particularly fun one so far just because it ended up being a dialogue between this computer program and these knitters that went over my head in a lot of ways,” Shane told me. Then, she generated new instructions, which members of the Ravelry community have actually attempted to knit. Prodded by a knitter on the knitting forum Ravelry, Shane trained a type of neural network on a series of over 500 sets of knitting instructions. Her latest project, still ongoing, pushes the joke into a new, physical realm. Or her neural-net-generated Halloween costumes: Punk Tree, Disco Monster, Spartan Gandalf, Starfleet Shark, and A Masked Box. Or her new paint-color names: Parp Green, Shy Bather, Farty Red, and Bull Cream. Perhaps you’ve seen the candy-heart slogans she generated for Valentine’s Day: DEAR ME, MY MY, LOVE BOT, CUTE KISS, MY BEAR, and LOVE BUN. Janelle Shane is a humorist who creates and mines her material from neural networks, the form of machine learning that has come to dominate the field of artificial intelligence over the last half-decade.
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