When a Robot Names a New Color of Paint
“Stoomy Brown.” “Burble Simp.” “Stargoon.”
Janelle Shane had been playing with recurrent neural networks—a type of machine-learning software—for more than a couple months when the computer told her to put horseradish in a chocolate cake.
The request didn’t come out of the blue. , another AI researcher, Shane had been asking her neural net to come up with recipes. She fed it thousands of cookbooks, then asked it to generate new, similar texts. The magic of neural nets is that, even though the computer
