Fun Friday Resources

Today we have your biggest time-waster of the week, if not the year: Ganbreeder. This is an Artificial Intelligence [AI] image generator, and the words surreal or trippy do not begin to describe what it does. The AI has been fed pictures of dogs, for example, which it turns into a set of numbers and now it thinks it knows what a ‘dog’ looks like. You can ask it to create a picture of a ‘dog,’ and it blats one out.

The thing is that the ‘I’ part of AI is still pretty ‘A’: the ‘dog’ it creates for you is not quite an image you can make your eyes see as an actual dog. It’s just off in ways you can’t quite describe.

Now suppose that you have the set of numbers for ‘dog’ and the set of numbers for ‘geyser,’ and you tell the AI to mix those two in some proportion. Not a problem, gurgles the AI, and blats out your ‘dog-geyser.’ That’s what Ganbreeder does.

Here, have a spider-pug:

created at ganbreeder.app

Ganbreeder gives you a couple of approaches to your own fetish objects:

• pick an image and mess with it

• create your own from scratch

In either case the process is the same. You can add ‘genes,’ edit the genes with sliders, crossbreed with other images, backtrack through an images genetic tree, and make new children. When you create something you can’t live without you can favorite it, download it, and tweet it. (Free account required.)

It’s awesome.

Here, have a goldfinch-cat.

Or a library-piano.

Or a goldfinch-flamingo-camel-vestment-lady’s slipper.

You’re welcome.