Snapshots of an AI's Psychedelic 'Dreams', by Emiko Jozuka

If you give an artificial neural network free reign to create something visually, what does it come up with? The answer: multi-coloured psychedelic landscapes with hybrid beasts and mutant horsemen.The images, which are as stunning as they are surreal, were created by Google’s image recognition neural network—a bunch of statistical learning models inspired by biological systems—in a project dubbed “Inceptionism”.

Researchers trained the neural network to recognize things like animals and objects in photographs by showing it millions of samples. Their aim is to hone a computer’s visual system so that it’ll be able to tell the difference between different objects and, in this case, interpret images in similar ways that humans do. For example, Google’s neural network can “see” shapes in images, in the same way that we can sometimes see the shape of an animal in a cloud.

The neural network is made of ten to 30 stacked layers of artificial neurons. The researchers feed an image into the input layer, with each layer communicating with the next until the network’s “answer” is produced from the final output layer.

The primary layers of the neural network identify relatively simple features such as edges or corners. Further up the chain, the middle layers interpret simple features that can suss out individual shapes like a leaf or a window. The final layers interpret the information collated from the first and intermediary layers so that the network can come up with something as complex as a tree or a house.

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