Turning Neural Networks Upside Down Produces Psychedelic Visuals

cjellibebi writes: Neural networks that were designed to recognize images also hold some interesting capabilities for generating them. If you run them backwards, they turn out to be capable of enhancing existing images to resemble the images they were meant to try and recognize. The results are pretty trippy. A Google Research blog post explains the research in great detail. There are pictures, and even a video. The Guardian has a digested article for the less tech-savvy.

Comments

They've nailed it

[DavidSpencer]

I've had a few up-close experiences with heavy psychedelics. Those photos took me right back. Wonderful insights!

Re:They've nailed it

[qpqp]

While I agree that the photos provoke a similar reaction on a superficial glance, what struck me while on psychedelics was the actual texture of what you see, which extends fractal-wise when concentrated upon.

I tried this myself

[Anonymous Coward]

I ran slashdot backwards through the DICE marketing bullshit neural network and got www.soylentnews.org

Wow!

[nospam007]

The slashdot UI produces psychedelic visuals even without any artificial or natural intelligence.
Every time I come here, there are icons all over the place, in the middle of the text, the title bar shows random icons or text and I'm not even on beta.
Not to mention the dupes or stupid articles and don't make me begin about the videos.

Re:Now THAT's art!

[captnjohnny1618]

A human can't do it? Alex Gray begs to differ.

I guess we could argue that it's "similar" (i.e. not the same), but it's pretty darn close ;-).

The Mandelbrot set is a very different animal from what these algorithms are doing. I agree that a human couldn't draw a Mandlebrot set, but in some sense this work is much less precise and analytic than something like a Mandlebrot set.

Is this your brain on drugs?

[jscottk]

This makes me wonder if a similar process is occurring in the brain of someone on a psychedelic. Are the compounds stimulating pattern recognition feedback loops from the inside out, causing people to see their imaginations manifested in the fuzz?

Re:Is this your brain on drugs?

[vix86]

There is a guy that wrote wrote an essay some years ago that suggested as much. He posited that drugs like psilocibin basically overload the brain and cause it to form feedback loops. Many of the effects you can experience on hallucinogens also suggest as much. Closed eye visuals for instance are basically the "lights" you see when you push on your eye balls. They are just amplified and put into a feedback loop. Thought loops are common on hallucinogens as well, I imagine its the result of that as well.

Prints

[lq_x_pl]

Any possibility that they will release higher-res versions of these images? Maybe sell some prints?
I realize these are just the output of a funnel-run-backwards, but they'd make awfully cool posters.