AI is absolutely horrible at naming paint colors
Tired of your boring eggshell walls? A new AI experiment recommends colors like "Sink" or "Bank Butt."
Researcher Janelle Shane trained a neural network to come up with paint names, and it resulted in gems like "Stoner Blue" and "Turdly," she wrote in a blog post.
She conducted an experiment by using a training data set of about 7,700 paint names from Sherwin-Williams along with the RGB (red, green, and blue color values).
She then had the network generate new colors and names for those colors. The results were hugely varied, including colors with Gray or Blue in the name that had nothing to do with those colors, or completely abstract and awesome names like "Stanky Bean."
Shane found that her network was especially fond of brown, beige, and gray. She has conducted a number of similar experiments with neural nets — from naming metal bands to generating recipes — with hilarious results. You can check out more of her work here.
Topics Artificial Intelligence
Freia Lobo wrote about Tech News for Mashable in NYC. You can follow her on twitter at @freialobo
