There’s a kind of neural network that learns to imitate whatever text you give it, whether that’s recipes, song lyrics, or even the names of guinea pigs.
Their imitations are often imperfect (they only know what’s in their dataset and therefore end up accidentally coming up with things that they don’t know are bad ideas). But one area where they tend to do well is inventing new species of things. The neural net’s birds were entirely believable, and its fish were generally no stranger than the species that already exist. So for my next project, I decided to generate some snakes.
I collected English common names for about 1,000 snakes and started training.
The first thing I noticed is that its snake names were a lot more noticeably fake than its birds or fish – the snake dataset is way smaller, so it had much fewer examples to learn from.
Tostlesnake Sine cobra Snoked snake Cancan rattlesnake Chippen’s putter python Southern coat snake Pinkwarm’s Copperanada Smart sea snake Western Nack Blonded snake Ham’s Pattlescops Green tree nosh Snake Hecker’s sea snake Ned-scaled tree viper Barned dater Snake Smalle’s mock ractlesnake Bland brown snake Corned python Common bust viper Smorthead Garter Snake
Some snakes did approach the level of believability. You might be able to bluff some herpetologists into thinking these are real.
Texan farter snake Shite snake Spitty rattlesnake Thing snake Brown brown Black Snake Tamestail farter Snake Black-neded tampon Madeshine spite- racer Bognia scat snake
I also decided to see what would happen if I trained a neural net both on snakes AND on Halloween costumes. Pleasingly, here are some of the snakes it came up with:
Wonder snake Fairy rattlesnake The Spacer Snake Robo snake Sexy cobra Bob dog tree Snake
I had way too much fun generating those, and ended up generating more than would fit here. If you’d like to read the rest of them (and optionally get bonus material every time I post), enter your email here.
I’m particularly fond of the “Common Bust Snake” which sounds like it lives ina particularly rube goldberg “booby trap”
