An effort to create a computer programme that can distinguish between faces, animals, patterns and other images has had the added bonus of giving Google bragging rights to a viral sensation.
Deep Dream is the name of an artificial intelligence programme owned by the internet search giant and designed to some day recognise photo contents on its own and then sort them. That requires an algorithm to allow it to reliably recognize everyday things like faces.
What has made Deep Dream popular is that it can visually recreate the process by which it assesses a picture, which seems to rely a lot upon comparing the image before it with known images from its data banks.
Thus, standard pictures - shown as Deep Dream sees them - come back as flurries of random eyes and heads surrounding known objects. Human faces are adorned with dog's snouts, bird's beaks or worms. It's enough to make you think the computer is hallucinating, or in a very deep dream, hence the name.
As weird as the images are, they're what the computer uses to compare pictures. And it seems to work.
Google wrote Deep Dream's code with an open-source licence, meaning it's available to anyone.
Some groups like Psychic-vr-lab.com have uploaded some of the pictures they've run through the system.
However, crunching a photo through Deep Dream is costly and can take days, which is why some have already given up on the adventure. But that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of images to marvel at on Twitter. Just follow the hashtag.
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