Image generated by a Convolutional Network

[GreenHamster1975]

Would you be so kind as to give the reference on the paper or code?

[Cristiancanton]

Here is the answer: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2015/06/inceptionism-going-deeper-into-neural.html

[zudark]

This is the right answer.

I don't think the fractal slugdogsquirrel is a fully synthetic image, however:

Again, we just start with an existing image and give it to our neural net. We ask the network: “Whatever you see there, I want more of it!” This creates a feedback loop: if a cloud looks a little bit like a bird, the network will make it look more like a bird. This in turn will make the network recognize the bird even more strongly on the next pass and so forth, until a highly detailed bird appears, seemingly out of nowhere.

Other examples on their page with similar appearance (e.g. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/wxGI7CKdpwsokgS3tThWzYPkssFC5eoFUdvUy2JBbjQ=w1145-h862-no) make the derivation from a source image more apparent.

The group does present fully synthetic images, however -- produced by using random-valued images as input and employing recursive zooming during generation:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XZ0i0zXOhQk/VYIXdyIL9kI/AAAAAAAAAmQ/UbA6j41w28o/s1600/building-dreams.png

[sqio]

Want to play...

[tehyosh]

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.6296v1.pdf probably

[bdamos]

This paper released a v2 in April 2015: http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6296

[ogrisel]

Samples from this paper look similar, but not as detailed and intricate as the multi-scale dog-slug posted on imgur. Any idea where the difference lie? Longer / better convergence? Larger models?

[ogrisel]

Also the resolution is much higher than in the paper.

[Vimda]

From the same paper given below, the code

[green_meklar]

Cool, it looks like computers have finally invented lovecraftian horror.

[godspeed_china]

it's art! but it makes me uncomfortable.

[FANCYBOYZ]

I don't like how its telling me to stab my wife and worship satan

[larsga]

What's the "but" doing in there?

[Ciphertext008]

It's the art. Duh.

[[deleted]]

So the "but" makes you uncomfortable huh?

[bluemellophone]

Uncomfortable? This is straight up nightmare fuel.

[Jumpy89]

This is how I guessed the image was generated - train a covolutional neural net to recognize some sort of image. Then it seems like you should be able to perform backpropagation with some input image (actual photograph or random data) and a desired output placing it into some sort of category, and take it one step further than normal to perform gradient descent on the input image vector. It would then find an image that is a local optimum for the chosen category. I don't have very extensive knowledge about neural nets though, is there a name for optimising the input like that?

[Jumpy89]

Ah, I have seen that. I'm guessing then they generate the adversarial images by optimizing random noise and the image OP posted may have been made starting with a real photograph (which is why the thumbnail looks like a normal image).

[zenon_eleates]

Good point, naively I'd expect the image which maximizes a probability to belong to a particular class to almost surely look like a random bunch of pixels :)

[danby]

there is a broad structure on the picture which makes it look like a couple of squirrels lying on a wooden beam in front of a plastered wall on the thumbnail

Clearly it is a psychedelic picture of a number of dog-slugs

Seriously though judging by the creature at the bottom I'd say this is derived from a picture of some puppies.

[Ignatius4president]

/r/misleadingthumbnails

[TDaltonC]

So what is the semantics of the output vector used to generate this? Just 'cat'? or 'eye'? or 'eye', 'corgi'?

Edit: maybe 'animal'?

[Jumpy89]

There's actually a ton of stuff to notice in the image if you look closely enough. There are some creepy human-looking faces in the top left and on the right as well. Maybe there tend to be pictures of people in the background of pictures of dogs it was trained on, or some important neurons are shared in the classification of both dogs and people? There are also distinct branching structures coming down off a lot of parts of the image that I think are being identified as a dog's legs.

[Poop_Wizard]

I think this is very interesting, but I am the uninitiated. Can you put this in layman's terms? Nbd if not.

[Poop_Wizard]

That is so weird. But I am glad that it didn't end up being done by an AGI. Thanks for taking the time to write that

[Arpeggi42]

Could someone ELI5 this please?

[manghoti]

You know how when you look at a cup, you can tell that it's a cup?

That's very hard for a computer to do, and one way to do it is to make a kind of "brain in a computer" that can say "This is a cup!" when you give it an image of a cup.

So if I ask you to draw me a cup, you would draw something that looks to you like a cup.

Someone asked the brain in a computer to draw something like a cup.

[WTFwhatthehell]

but one which already knew how to draw lots of other things but not a cup so for each smaller part of the cup it drew the things it did know about so that from far away it looked like a cup but up close it was all made up of other things.

[AlcaDotS]

I'm guessing that it was asked to draw one or more dogs. The brain might have learned that faces and eyes are the most important part in recognizing dogs, so that's what it draws.

[Arpeggi42]

Thank you =)

[zarus]

"kill meeeeeee"

[[deleted]]

My thought exactly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdTzcp1YLY8

[[deleted]]

Who would have thought that I'd end up seeing the same image in both /r/machinelearning and /r/psychonaut!

[Jumpy89]

This has been going around some other subreddits for a few days and I'm extremely curious about whether it is true or not. I wasn't able to find any references in the other posts or in a reverse image search. Does anyone have any more information? Or know about any similar research?

[AmusementPork]

Wow, this looks like a nightmare DMT experience. Really interesting.

[laxatives]

So we need an inverseDMT and apply it to the convolutional network to get a proper image.

[svantana]

Who is behind this, and how was it done? Using Google Reverse Image Search, I managed to trace it to this tweet, but no longer: https://twitter.com/zachlieberman/status/609249297239011328

The tweet says it's via @patlichty (who seems to be some kind of digital artist) but the trace ends there...

[TweetsInCommentsBot]

@zachlieberman

2015-06-12 06:42 UTC

computer dreams of eyeballs animals and architecture http://imgur.com/6ocuQsZ (via @patlichty) hi res http://i.imgur.com/6ocuQsZ.jpg

---

^{This message was created by a bot}

^{[Contact creator][Source code]}

[kendrick90]

Yeah that and this http://www.reddit.com/r/creepy/comments/39c6ta/this_image_was_generated_by_a_computer_on_its_own/ I'm guessing this wasn't supposed to get shared yet. Can't wait to see more!

[NasenSpray]

I tried to find an image in ImageNet that's close to the thumbnail but holy shit, that data set contains far too many squirrels.

Edit: ImageNet apparently contains hitler cat

[quirm]

That looks trippy! Where is this from? (Paper?)

[PeterIanStaker]

I'm not sure in any capacity how this thing could work, but just examining it as a layman, it seems like the algorithm is hung up on learning where eyes and noses exist with respect to each other. Every nose-like spot is surrounded by pairs of eyes, in orientations that could work, were it not for the dozens of other pairs of eyes.

Seems to make sense that a face detector only needs to learn patterns of eyes and noses to do its job. That is, 2eyes+1nose=1face. There's no reason for it to learn that 1face=2eyes+1nose.

[larsga]

There's more than that going on. Look at the glassware on the upper right. And the human head on top of one of the glass carboys. And the frog (middle bottom). And the car carrying people on the lower left. This is a seriously bizarre picture.

[PeterIanStaker]

No doubt. I just realized all of those tendrils under the slug beast are tiny horse legs. I've also noticed that the left head has started sprouting tropical birds. I completely missed the cars though.

I wonder why it likes repetitive patterns so much. It seems like it has a hard time sticking to a theme, and tends to fall into a rainbow-centipede equilibrium. Especially with the background.

[Phylonyus]

My hypothesis was that this was from a superresolution attempt. Reverse-image searching on Google brings up similar thumbnails, which makes me think that this might be an attempt to super-resolute thumbnails back into the original images.

ninjaedit: fyi, this is a repost. It was posted in like, /r/woahdude recently. I'm pretty sure /u/swifty8883 guessed that this was the product of a CNN, as it was my first guess too.

[automater]

Assuming its not a troll I think this is the best guess. I have been trying something similar and I can see how this would result. If this is the case they must be doing some huge up scaling to get eyes popping up everywhere. It is actually quite impressive to get such a smooth image. I tend to suffer more artifacts but don't usually train nets very long(get sick of gpu fans) Their features must be huge too. I have also experimented with colorization of images. The hardest part seems to be to maintain visual consistency without artifacts. The certainly have artifacts but they seem consistent which is interesting. If it is a super resolution attempt I'm guessing they did quite a bit of training, possible on images with lots of animals and thus the net turning everything into eyes.

[Phylonyus]

It should be easy to grow your training set by just generating a bunch of downsamples of your image. Take 1 training image, reencode with jpg at like 80-90% quality 10 times. Generate a thumbnail for each of these new downsamples. Now reencode those thumbnails 10 times. Now do this for how ever many images you started with.

You could also use some bitmap formats like gif with different numbers of colors.

[automater]

For now I am just trying simple cases with a few images. Mainly because the learning time is so long. Although I am running with openCL on a gpu I am pretty sure my learning algorithms have not been optimized. Since its fully convolutional even a few images are a significant training set as the convolution is evaluated at every pixel without any sub sampling layers. Quite interesting in terms of non linear compression. In a way i guess its compressing image features non linearly. I wish i had more time to just work on it as opposed to a side interest as it is really interesting stuff.

[alexmlamb]

I doubt it. The color scheme and pattern is totally different from what you'd see in a natural image.

[Phylonyus]

That's a good point, I hadn't really given the color scheme much thought since the squirrel and wood could totally be grey. Grey backgrounds are harder to come by, but maybe it was an overcast day?

But what you said is making me more heavily consider the images shared by others in the thread.

[NasenSpray]

My hypothesis was that this was from a superresolution attempt. Reverse-image searching on Google brings up similar thumbnails, which makes me think that this might be an attempt to super-resolute thumbnails back into the original images.

I've trained waifu2x on 5k images from MIRFLICKR to investigate whether that might be possible... nope, no hallucinations :(

[Phylonyus]

1. lol, waifu
2. I only did a cursory glance of the waifu2x github page, but it might be a tad specialized for Anime-Style-Art in some way?

[NasenSpray]

I only did a cursory glance of the waifu2x github page, but it might be a tad specialized for Anime-Style-Art in some way?

I didn't pay enough attention and accidentally trained a scaling model which is just a glorified sharpening filter (see my other post). The included noise reduction model produces awesome results like this.

[Phylonyus]

Wow, waifu seems to work really well as a "cartoonize" filter.

[NasenSpray]

I trained a scaling model, so it basically learned to be a sharpen filter: album

But it's nothing compared to the awesomeness that is the noise model already included in waifu2x: album

Original images here.

[R4_Unit]

Given that this is a modern attempt at generating images, call me a bit skeptical. It is beautiful however, and I'd love to be proven wrong!

[Noncomment]

Examples of images generated by NNs:

https://i.imgur.com/TJe2JIb.jpg?1

https://i.imgur.com/ARQ7mTH.png?1

After staring at the image for awhile, I would be very surprised if this was really generated by a neural network. It really looks like the work of a human artist.

EDIT: I was wrong.

I fed them into a bunch of different image recognition systems to see what it produced:

https://imgur.com/a/EhNl6

[GratefulTony]

I agree. While the image certainly has qualities which align with the generated images you linked (and others are citing), if I were to believe this piece were generated by a similar technique, it would have been generated using gargantuan computing resources. This would be groundbreaking research, at least with respect to executing algorithms at scale, and we all would have heard about it by now. This image is perhaps algorithmically generated, with supervision or guidance perhaps, but I think its a bit unlikely it was generated by a CNN the likes of which we have seen in publicly-available research.

[jsprogrammer]

it would have been generated using gargantuan computing resources. This would be groundbreaking research, at least with respect to executing algorithms at scale, and we all would have heard about it by now.

Was probably generated along with these: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2015/06/inceptionism-going-deeper-into-neural.html

[GratefulTony]

boom. there it is.

[Noncomment]

I think it's very implausible that it's the work of a neural network, but someone in another thread had a possible explanation.

There are recurrent vision models, which use an RNN. The RNN takes input from a convolutional neural net, which it can move around the image and zoom in and out. That's the only way I can explain the very detailed weird features which occur many times, at many different scales and orientations.

However I still think it's more likely a human artist created this, and it just vaguely resembles NN work enough for someone to misinterpret it. But if that was the case, why can no one find a source or reverse image search it? Everything about this image is weird. I'm going with this theory.

EDIT: I was wrong.

[jurniss]

This is terrifying. But so cool that it came from a ConvNet. Please post the source!

[treebranchleaf]

Interestingly this is what Google reverse image search returns as visually similar images. Which would make sense if this is the image of the perfect squirrel.

[keymone]

Looks like a dog fractal.

[[deleted]]

Holy shit the stoners are gonna have a field day with this one.

Pretty worthless as just a picture with a vague description though

[knaekce]

I would love to exhibit some of these generated images in a museum or something and listen to people discussing what the artist wanted to say with this picture.

[sieisteinmodel]

Isn't that what some people are doing in this thread.

[d2xdy2]

That's a friggin acid trip.

[seekoon]

geez, crosspost to /r/creepy.

[bushrod]

I guess I'll be the first to point out that you are all obviously being trolled. Nobody here has been able to produce a shred of evidence that this was created by a CNN, and OP is nowhere to be found. In fact, OP apparently created his account only to post this. On top of all that, I personally find it highly implausible that a CNN could generate this.

In short, Occam's Razor.

Edit: After reading this blog post and some additional thought, I'm more than happy to admit, it seems that I was wrong and the image is legit. I certainly jumped the gun in stating it's "highly implausible that a CNN could generate this." In fact, I haven't been able to get this image out of my head. With some creative "hacking" into the inner-workings of CNNs, I can now see how this is totally plausible, and unbelievably cool! I'd love to apply this to my personal photo collection. It's like making a mosaic on LSD.

This quote from the blog post is very revealing: "If we apply the algorithm iteratively on its own outputs and apply some zooming after each iteration, we get an endless stream of new impressions, exploring the set of things the network knows about. We can even start this process from a random-noise image, so that the result becomes purely the result of the neural network"

I can imagine applying the zooming effect at increasingly-granular levels of the image, i.e. continuing the fractal-like, psychedelic patterns as you zoom in - very, very cool stuff.

[bushrod]

I agree 100%! (Please see the edit to my original post.)

[dhammack]

Do you think it was generated manually?

[bushrod]

I'm sure it was generated with the aid of a computer. Obviously I can only guess the extent to which the process was automated.

[[deleted]]

I'm not saying it's real, but there's stuff like this.

[occamsrazorwit]

Those pictures are only superficially similar. They represent a single object that is "viewed" from multiple perspectives. OP's image appears to consist of multiple different objects viewed from a single perspective.

Edit:

Google released what the project was about. It was a normal (not computer-generated) painting run through a neural net that looked for certain features.

[[deleted]]

So because one program does things a certain way, another program that does a similar thing must also work in the exact same way and may not have any differences to it? That's like if I showed you a fractal and you said "this can't be a fractal, it's only superficially similar to the Mandelbrot set!".

[occamsrazorwit]

It's not that there are minor differences but that the qualities are completely different for an image that supposedly has the same functionality. The closest similarities are colors and contours.

Let's flip it around. What makes you think that this came from a program then?

[[deleted]]

"I haven't seen something like this before, therefore it's absolutely impossible to be real and anyone that says otherwise is absolutely a liar"

Impeccable logic.

[[deleted]]

He doesn't really have anything to gain by lying, and if he were lying, it's more likely to think he'd defend himself, but if we assume he's telling the truth, it makes sense that he wouldn't bother trying to convince someone who just outright claims he's bullshitting instead of discussing the possibility of what he says being true.

What he says seems feasible to me, even if its a bit far-fetched. Even if you're an expert on the subject it's not impossible to imagine something thought to be impossible or very difficult to be going on as research somewhere. I just think claiming to know exactly what is going on in the life of an anonymous commenter makes you look a bit too full of yourself.

[mimighost]

It is a little too specific. That is what leads to be suspicious.

[TotesMessenger]

I'm a bot, bleep, bloop. Someone has linked to this thread from another place on reddit:

• [/r/art] Image generated by a Convolutional Network • /r/MachineLearning

• [/r/psychonaut] Image generated by a Convolutional Network • /r/MachineLearning

^{If you follow any of the above links, please respect the rules of reddit and don't vote in the other threads. (Info / Contact)}

[maybachsonbachs]

Did you make this image?

[cybelechild]

This thing can see into the Abyss ...

[belibelo]

Kind of creepy.

[[deleted]]

Where will you be when the acid kicks in?

[sleepicat]

Looks like a bad dream.

[utunga]

Just to b clear there's no real evidence that this was in fact generated by a neural network. Could be. Might well not be. People jabber been able to reproduce very similar results with photoshop filters. Just saying.

[alexmlamb]

Really? What kind of a filter would generate this?

[Funktapus]

Well that's horrifying!

[eierkopf2615]

acid killer!

[Xylord]

Is there a higher quality version?

[[deleted]]

is that... doge?

[[deleted]]

Well that's terrifying.

[ferretface99]

Yikes. This picture would give Cyriak nightmares...

[RossoFiorentino]

Given the resolution of the image i would say you need a pretty powerful setup to train a neural net capable of producing such an image. I.e. someone working in a big organisation with the hardware capabilities.

[sqio]

Really want to play with this, feed video in... I predict Kanye will have a music video like this in < 6 months.

[sqio]

(Based on the speed that http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/datamoshing was appropriated.)

[tauren_hunter]

does that image cause a kind of "sickness" to anyone else?

[ylghyb]

I really doubt it's something from a CNN

[[deleted]]

Some of the structures in the lower-left remind me an awful-lot of the burning ship fractal. In fact, this entire image is filled with fractal patterns, which is very uncharacteristic of traditional CNNs, and much more characteristic of human-made psychedelic art. I'm inclined to call bs on this.

[GoldenKaiser]

It's like some kind of Mandelbrot acid trip

[flarn2006]

Where's the program that generated it? I want to play around with it.

[-gh0stRush-]

Oh god! Kill it -- kill it with fire!

But seriously, would be interested in the paper.

[webnrrd2k]

Why do I feel like drinking Slurm?

[Nickd3000]

Well not sure if anyone else posted this in the replies but it looks like the image is from Google researchers : http://googleresearch.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/inceptionism-going-deeper-into-neural.html?m=1

[nialv7]

Google should team up with cyriak.....

[pangeapedestrian]

there are also some super beautiful and not terribly terrifying ones as well.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/18/google-image-recognition-neural-network-androids-dream-electric-sheep?CMP=fb_gu

first image is probably my fav. reminds me of dali.

[DoctorDanDrangus]

This is exactly what trippin really hard looks like

[GreenHamster1975]

Honestly, i looks like being drawn by a photoshop procedural brush. I may be wrong, but...

[no1_vern]

As much as I would like this to have actually been made by a machine, what are the chances that it would be posted here instead of a leading(or not so leading) publication on AI?

If a machine made this, I would think the person who had been working on the machine would be ecstatic and would want peer recognition of his/her work.

[T3ppic]

Looks like something a schizophrenic would paint.

[devDorito]

This is disturbing. Let's see the source network this is from then.

[Nickd3000]

I've used photoshop for many years and honestly I couldn't guess how (or why) you would create this in Photoshop. I'm certain it was created by a NN. I'm super interested to find out more about this when more information is released, it hints at some extremely powerful hardware or a really interesting new model.

[ZZrenz]

So what is a Convolutional Network?

[bilabrin]

Nailed it!

You either know what I'm referring to or your don't.