Do machines really dream?
Have you heard about Google’s machines that dream? In 2014, a team of researchers at Google stumbled into an extraordinary outcome of their project that has since taken the internet by storm. The world is calling it ‘DeepDream’. With an artificial neural network, DeepDream was built for pattern and image recognition.
Originally, the network was trained to recognize the images presented to it. When the team decided to reverse this process, so the software was given an image that it had to interpret. The artificial neural network, supplied with an object and tasked with recreating an image of it, would associate specific features or patterns to the object and turn it into a bizarre work of art.
DeepDream has been aptly named for the fact that it produces images that are dreamlike with a deeply psychedelic vibe to it. In the process of finding patterns and enhancing them to identify and classify images the neural network attempts to see and understand the world like humans do. The software is taught to recognize specific shapes and real-world objects with the help of a bank of images. When it is given a new image to classify, DeepDream re-filters the results to emphasize the objects it has recognized before. It repeats this process until the image is transformed.
If a tree, for example, looks even the slightest bit like a dog (from a picture the network has been shown and told it was a dog before), the software will start to transform the image. Until finally, the network sees a detailed image of a dog in the picture it was supposed to classify. All in all, the notion of a machine that dreams is a well-marketed message, but has nothing to do with actual dreaming.
DeepDream has made it into pop culture
DeepDream caused an internet frenzy which then led it straight to pop culture. In November 2015, a British electro pop band released a music video one that left fans with a mind-bending experience. The band had used DeepDream’s psychedelic visualizations to match the remix of their new single.
DeepDream has also found its way into art. Last year, artists on Esty started selling deepdreamed versions of their art. What started with Google’s DeepDream project, has now created new ways of seeing the world, even influencing mainstream pop culture.
DeepDream’s bizarre results are so captivating that it is now widely used as a filter choice for photos, even made available by Google for Google photos. If you would like to give it a try, head on over to their website, upload an image and watch as the software transforms it into a psychedelic piece of art.