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posted by takyon on Saturday June 20 2015, @08:20PM   Printer-friendly
from the psychedelic dept.

The Guardian is reporting that Google is trying to understand how its neural net for image recognition works by feeding in random noise then telling the neural net to look for certain features then feeding the resulting image back in. Apart from anything else some of the images generated are astounding.

Link to original Google research article.


Original Submission

Related Stories

Google's "Magenta" Machine Learning Project Creates Music 27 comments

Google is demonstrating music created using machine learning techniques. It has previously made psychedelic art:

It's a long way to Carnegie Hall, but we bet that Google researchers are already thinking of the day when they can send a robot or AI to play an interesting, improvised piano performance in a major venue.

While that's not the stated end goal of Magenta, a new project from the Google Brain team, it's certainly a possibility. The entire premise of Magenta is built around two simple questions: Can machines make art? And can machines make music? And, dare we say it, there's also an unstated third question: Can machines make either art or music that's any good?

We'll let you judge the last one. Here's the first piece of music from Google's machine-learning system. It's only 90 seconds long, but it's at least an early demonstration of Magenta's capabilities.


Original Submission

Hallucination Machine: Psychedelic Visuals in VR 10 comments

Researchers from Sussex University Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science have applied a modified version of Google's DeepDream algorithm to panoramic video:

The researchers used a modified version of Deep Dream to process a panoramic video of the university campus. Then they showed it to 12 volunteers, finding that the visual hallucinations were similar to those brought on by psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms.

The volunteers were asked questions like whether they felt a loss of control or a loss of their sense of self, and whether they saw patterns and colours. Their answers matched up closely with the results of a 2013 study [open, DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2063-13.2013] [DX] into the experience of taking psilocybin.

In a second experiment, 22 participants were asked whether they felt any sense of temporal distortion, or a warped sense of time. In this case the responses were similar to those recorded after watching control videos.

That would seem to suggest the researchers' machine can replicate some, but not all, the effects of being high on psychedelic drugs. However, only a few volunteers have been tested so far, and they were a different group to those quizzed on psilocybin back in 2013.

This is just the beginning for the technology – the system is very flexible and can be tweaked in all kinds of ways. In the future, participants could even get to adjust the parameters of the experience themselves.

With better hardware, the algorithms could be run in real time and applied to an augmented reality view instead of a pre-recorded panoramic video.

Also at Newsweek.

A Deep-Dream Virtual Reality Platform for Studying Altered Perceptual Phenomenology (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-16316-2) (DX)

Related: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Study Suggests Psilocybin "Resets" the Brains of Depressed People


Original Submission

"Depressed" and "Hallucinating" AI 46 comments

Could artificial intelligence get depressed and have hallucinations?

As artificial intelligence (AI) allows machines to become more like humans, will they experience similar psychological quirks such as hallucinations or depression? And might this be a good thing?

Last month, New York University in New York City hosted a symposium called Canonical Computations in Brains and Machines, where neuroscientists and AI experts discussed overlaps in the way humans and machines think. Zachary Mainen, a neuroscientist at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, a neuroscience and cancer research institute in Lisbon, speculated [36m video] that we might expect an intelligent machine to suffer some of the same mental problems people do.

[...] Q: Why do you think AIs might get depressed and hallucinate?

A: I'm drawing on the field of computational psychiatry, which assumes we can learn about a patient who's depressed or hallucinating from studying AI algorithms like reinforcement learning. If you reverse the arrow, why wouldn't an AI be subject to the sort of things that go wrong with patients?

Q: Might the mechanism be the same as it is in humans?

A: Depression and hallucinations appear to depend on a chemical in the brain called serotonin. It may be that serotonin is just a biological quirk. But if serotonin is helping solve a more general problem for intelligent systems, then machines might implement a similar function, and if serotonin goes wrong in humans, the equivalent in a machine could also go wrong.

Related: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?


Original Submission

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  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday June 20 2015, @09:24PM

    by kaszz (4211) on Saturday June 20 2015, @09:24PM (#198804) Journal

    Androids don't dream. It might be running NetBSD. So computers with neural networks may have dreamlike behavior.

    • (Score: 5, Funny) by LoRdTAW on Sunday June 21 2015, @12:53AM

      by LoRdTAW (3755) on Sunday June 21 2015, @12:53AM (#198858) Journal

      It might be running NetBSD.

      So you're saying it needs therapy to help cope with its many daemons. That is disturbing.

  • (Score: 2) by looorg on Saturday June 20 2015, @10:02PM

    by looorg (578) on Saturday June 20 2015, @10:02PM (#198811)

    What if I put it on vibrate-mode, will the android device still enter dream-sleep?

  • (Score: 2) by JNCF on Saturday June 20 2015, @11:54PM

    by JNCF (4317) on Saturday June 20 2015, @11:54PM (#198833) Journal

    So LSD induces a recursive pattern-matching algorithm in the human brain, right? Is that what this means, guys? Is that why it seems like The Meaning of Life was hidden under that molecule, because our ape-brains just really like finding patterns in the noise?

    Well shit, I was hoping it would turn out to be some sort Terence-McKenna-hoodoo-voodoo-bullshit. So it goes...

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 21 2015, @12:36AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 21 2015, @12:36AM (#198854)

      I haven't taken LSD, but I have taken psilocybin, and these images look VERY familiar. I don't think it has anything to do with some kind of spiritual truth, it's just a good way of processing images. Much like other man made structures and algorithms might look a lot like things you'd find in nature.

  • (Score: 2) by Rich on Sunday June 21 2015, @01:36AM

    by Rich (945) on Sunday June 21 2015, @01:36AM (#198883) Journal

    To me, these images look strange in one way, but very familiar in another. I've seen similar opinions on other forums, so this might be(come) a rather interesting discovery. One thing that I have not seen mentioned yet is, that some of these look a lot like from "Iblard", a fantasy world created by Japanese artist Naohisa Inoue.

    http://www.iblard.com/english/ [iblard.com]

  • (Score: 2) by quadrox on Sunday June 21 2015, @06:23AM

    by quadrox (315) on Sunday June 21 2015, @06:23AM (#198966)

    Unfortunately I don't have much to comment otherwise, but this article is pure awesome. Thanks for sharing!

    • (Score: 2) by fleg on Monday June 22 2015, @03:02AM

      by fleg (128) Subscriber Badge on Monday June 22 2015, @03:02AM (#199269)

      glad you liked it! :)

  • (Score: 2) by fritsd on Sunday June 21 2015, @12:52PM

    by fritsd (4586) on Sunday June 21 2015, @12:52PM (#199054) Journal

    I found it awesome as well, I'm going to try it out if I ever find the energy.

    I vaguely remember how to program a backprop, and I know a little bit about the problem that an m → n dimensional mapping, with m >> n, cannot be inverted. Besides, with a sigmoid activation function, the mapping isn't even linear.

    So how do you construct an (m-n) dimensional basis set to "espalier" [bbc.com] the missing dimensions?

    Backprop is pretty simple to understand, maybe what these researchers found is simple as well.

    The images remind me of Jeroen Bosch's painting "de Tuin der Lusten [wikipedia.org]" (might be NSFW or make you crazy). Or like when you read Mythago Wood [wikipedia.org]. Quite disturbing, really.

    • (Score: 2) by acid andy on Sunday June 21 2015, @07:27PM

      by acid andy (1683) on Sunday June 21 2015, @07:27PM (#199167) Homepage Journal

      These could be self associative neural networks e.g. Hopfield networks. I am not sure if back prop is used with those, though I'm no expert.

      --
      If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2015, @03:52AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2015, @03:52AM (#199279)

        Their algorithm sucks if it is supposed to recognize bananas but does so even if there are no bananas... I think this is just spin on a failed project.

        • (Score: 2) by fritsd on Monday June 22 2015, @10:55AM

          by fritsd (4586) on Monday June 22 2015, @10:55AM (#199362) Journal

          Their algorithm sucks if it is supposed to recognize bananas but does so even if there are no bananas... I think this is just spin on a failed project.

          Failed projects are sometimes the most interesting projects. Have you never heard about serendipity [wikipedia.org]? Like how Teflon [wikipedia.org] was invented? Tefal frying pans FTW.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2015, @07:19PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2015, @07:19PM (#199548)

            No disagreement there. I just disagree with (the possible) obfuscation of the motivations for the project.

    • (Score: 2) by jasassin on Wednesday July 01 2015, @06:53AM

      by jasassin (3566) <jasassin@gmail.com> on Wednesday July 01 2015, @06:53AM (#203648) Homepage Journal

      The images remind me of Jeroen Bosch's painting "de Tuin der Lusten

      Wow. Some far out artwork. Thanks for the link! Very interesting.

      --
      jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2015, @09:00PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2015, @09:00PM (#199586)

    That's my objection to AIs done this way:

    You may think you've "succeeded" but you only got X%.
    You don't actually know how it works.
    You don't actually know when it fails (especially for more complex ones).
    You don't actually know what you're doing.

    It's like the Alchemy days - where people were mixing stuff together and sometime stuff worked, sometimes stuff seemed to be promising (fool's gold). And they didn't have a good idea of what was going on.