Google’s Psychedelic AI Art Takes Twitter by Storm

By Beckett Mufson

via @Kyttenjanae

Last month, Google blew the lid off of a trippy psychedelic image of a squirrel that had the internet confused: Had the strange images of dogs and noses been designed by a human, or a computer? It turned out that it had, indeed, been created as part of Inceptionism, a project that showcases images generated by the company’s image recognition algorithm. Androids, it was declared, do dream of electric sheep. Google released an open-sourced version of the neural network learning algorithm on July 1, dubbed DeepDream, and the internet has spent the last week going wild with it. Programmer Zain Shah created a simple interface for applying the algorithm to a jpeg, and now, warped, psychedelic remixes of the Doof Warrior, Johnny Depp, Jackson Pollock’s No. 5, and a scene from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas are out, covered in puppyslugs and disembodied eyes, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Artists like Memo Akten and KyttenJanae are already incorporating the algorithm into their practices, and a DeepDreams Twitter bot has appeared, courtesy of Japan’s Psychic VR Lab. With these tools, you, too, can produce your own deepdreamed videos, GIFs, images, video games, and more, which has the double-positive of finding crazy patterns in your own face and giving researchers more material to learn about how machines learn. Check out a few of our favorites below.