AI Company Tried To Generate Cat Photos From Scratch With Delightfully Cat-astrophic Results

The AI engine that produced the creepy cat photos is called StyleGAN because apparently, what works for human faces proved to be another story when it comes to cat faces.

In fact, the images of these made-up people were so good it was nearly impossible for human viewers to distinguish from photos of real people. But for some reason, the same algorithm that generated flawless human faces created cats with misshapen heads; the wrong number of eyes and legs; and bodies that were too long, too short, unusually rotund or rectangular, and bent at peculiar angles.

So, why couldn't StyleGAN create adorably realistic cat photos? The algorithm was doing its best with what it had to work with — and when it came to cats, the thousands of reference images that it used were less than ideal, said Janelle Shane, a researcher who wrote about the bizarre cats on her blog AI Weirdness.

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"In many ways, generating cats is more of a challenge than generating human faces, since cats can be in so many different poses", Shane writes on her blog.

"It has an easier time generating texture than figuring out where all the legs and tails go. I've noticed that for some reason, whenever it generates kittens, one is normal and the rest are haunted. There must be something difficult about pictures containing multiple subjects.

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With humans it was even worse...

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They have unsuccessfully tried sourcing cat’s images from the internet, because when it generated some cats, it added meme text to them, assuming that white blocky lettering is just part of what “cat” is.

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They have also attempted to generate cats with the Shutterstock watermark, although actually spelling “Shutterstock” proved tricky for it.

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"Another delightful thing about its internet-derived dataset: quite a lot of the cats look an awful lot like Grumpy Cat. She’s only one cat, but she had a profound impact on what StyleGAN thinks cats look like", Shane writes.

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How about some more funny cats? go in and vote for our best cat meme of the decade

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