#algopop

Fooling OpenAI’s CLIP Vision system

OpenAI have developed a computer vision system called CLIP to recognize objects, images, and text, but this leaves it vulnerable to be easily confused by  text labels. 

“CLIP’s multimodal neurons generalize across the literal and the iconic, which may be a double-edged sword. Through a series of carefully-constructed experiments, we demonstrate that we can exploit this reductive behavior to fool the model into making absurd classifications. We have observed that the excitations of the neurons in CLIP are often controllable by its response to images of text, providing a simple vector of attacking the model.”

LitterCam

Computer vision software can now detect motorists throwing litter out of their window and match this with the car’s number plate to issue an automatic fine of £90. The first trial of the new system will begin in Maidstone, Kent, UK. 

BearID Project

“We develop noninvasive technologies to identify and monitor bears, facilitating their conservation.”

AI autocompletes Windows 95 startup tune

Here’s what happens when the Windows 95 startup sound is fed to OpenAI Jukebox algorithms to generate its continuation. To train Jukebox on a number of music genres, OpenAI researchers crawled the web to extract a new dataset of 1.2 million songs paired with corresponding lyrics and metadata.

Chants of Fuck the Algorithm

Students gathered outside of the department of education, in London, to protest Ofqual’s use of an Algorithm to determine this year’s A-level exam results, of which 40% were downgraded, causing many students to lose their places at universities. Video credit: Huck

First Order Kiss by Shardcore

The artist Shardcore has used a Machine Learning technique called First Order Motion Model to animate celebrities singing the Prince song kiss.

training an existing StyleGAN model of faces, on cats

Janelle Shane has run various ‘transfer learning’ experiments with RunwayML, where you train an existing model on a new set of images. Here, the popular StyleGAN v2 ‘faces’ model is trained for a while on photos of her cats.  

Coughing Simulations 

Various research groups are using software to run simulations of how coughing can spread in public places. The first one is by Aalto university and the airplane one is by researchers at Purdue University. Are these funny or scary? 

AI Memes by imgFlip

This AI meme generator autocompletes popular meme templates using Machine Learning. The Neural Network model was trained on memes created by Imgflip users. The generator has an easy-to-use interface (pictured top) where you can choose a template and add optional keywords to influence the generated text. Here is a result I got using the ‘Distracted Boyfriend’ meme, along with some of the most popular results from the AI Memes stream.

Sketchflix by Mario Klingemann

A drawing bot continuously doodles on an online canvas. The bot is present for conversation - as a spectator you can write messages on the canvas and the bot responds (powered by a ML text generator called GPT-2).

Human-to-Animal translation

A new machine learning model called StarGAN v2 can do image-to-image translation - allowing for experiments into turning humans into animals. Image source here.

very #algopop

Yelp! 

Yelp trained a neural net to eliminate bugs from its app’s code, and it simply deleted everything, or so they claim, in their version notes on the app-store. It could be yet another case of the “algorithms ate my homework” excuse for when humans mess up.  

No One Is Lonely (owo uwu owo uwu) 

Google Translate found poetry.

The Igbo language is tonal, and apparently particularly laden with semantic ambiguity, which could be one reason Translate appears to be overdetermining meaning here.

What crowd surveillance software does for fun in it’s spare time.

Google Translate’s reading of a Spanish menu - with Puppy Warm, and the Hamburger of Fear Complete. A holiday snap by Shardcore

A user interaction with the Visual Chatbot, a thing made by researchers looking into “meaningful dialog with humans in natural, conversational language about visual content.” I’m trying to figure out what is natural about the above conversation.

A Samsung Smart Fridge doing its GDPR terms update. The fridge requires you to give it the OK before being allowed to reach for the milk. 

Algo-generated reports on global offal markets on Amazon

A collection of computer-generated books, available to buy on Amazon, offer information about the frozen edible offal markets for beef, pork and ‘sheep and horses’, for every continent, in 2016 (only 2016). The books, and software, are by a company called Icon Group. Unfortunately the books are quite expensive.