Google's AI has made some really trippy images, and now you can buy some of them!
In an effort to understand how its artificial intelligence interprets the world, Google began a process it dubbed "inceptionism" in June.
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The purpose of inceptionism was to see how Google's AI neural networks carried out classification tasks so engineers could further improve the system. But a quirky result of the project was the production of images that look like a serious acid trip.
The project quickly garnered a lot of interest among programmers and artists, so Google decided to open-source its code, dubbed DeepDream, so that anyone could make their own funky images.
To celebrate this new branch of art, Google will auction more than two dozen of its computer-generated images at the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts in San Francisco on Friday.
Here's how inceptionism works and a look at some of the images that will be available at the auction.
Inceptionism can work one of two ways. The first way is to feed Google's neural network an image and ask it to look for something specific.
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Above is a nice breakdown as to how it works. In the second column, we see Google fed its neural network an image of a tree. Because that neural network is trained to look for buildings in an image, it spat back a squat, green building.
But the second, perhaps more fun, way to use inceptionism is to feed the neural network an image and let it decide what it sees.
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Google fed a neural network an image of a sky, and it saw birds!
When taking that second approach, what the neural network will produce depends on how many layers the image goes through. Google's AI Network is made up of 10-30 layers. The first layer, or input layer, will look at the edges or corners of an image.
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Images that go through the first layer will tend to come back with some added swirls or strokes, but look more or less like the original image.
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