You’ve been mellowed out by the ASMR tingles of Bob Ross. And you’ve been seen the disturbing Cronenberging of internet images by DeepDream.
But what happens when DeepDream is asked to draw some happy little trees? Gut-wrenching head-trips. Because DeepDream doesn’t see happy little trees. Deep dream sees deeply artificial trees — via IFLScience!
DeepDream is a convolutional neural network, a style of computing inspired by the brain, that identifies and recognizes images and patterns. Most of the time, it’s used to create nightmarish visions like these, but it’s also a surprisingly insightful visualization that shows how computers “think” in regards to tasks like image classification and speech recognition.
As Alexander Reben explains in the description: “This artwork represents what it would be like for an AI to watch Bob Ross on LSD (once someone invents digital drugs). It shows some of the unreasonable effectiveness and strange inner workings of deep learning systems. The unique characteristics of the human voice are learned and generated as well as hallucinations of a system trying to find images which are not there.”