A friend linked to a thing today that’s pretty cool: the Deep Dream Generator. It’s a computer program that will take two photos and try to redraw one in the style of the other one. I gave it a picture of my mug and had it use a line drawing of a face as the style, and got the result below.

They call it AI. I don’t know about that. To me, AI would be a program that is self-aware and goes beyond its programming in unpredictable ways. This “learns” to draw in the style of a picture, but that’s still just one program writing new algorithms according to how it was programmed to do so. It’s interesting, though; and for someone like me who couldn’t draw to save his own life, it’s a way to get some artistic effects by rendering pictures in different styles and seeing what happens.