Where's My Thought Translator

Psychedelic Artist Here

Text rules the internet. We know that. (It's why you can't google smells.)

But humans aren't born to read, and if we had the choice, we would much rather talk to things than write to them. This is why speech recognition has become such a big deal.

For a while there, voice rec was in trouble. Kind of like how autocorrect was in trouble, maybe you remember that more.

Then came all these neural nets and backward propagation, and now we have mindbots playing video games better than humans. Machine learning artificial intelligence is on a winning streak these days. But it's funny that with all this talk about biased algorithms, we often fail to recognize one group of people that are consistently being left out, even from the most basic of services offered by our digitally-assisted exocortices.

The people left out are those who are hard of hearing, who cannot see well, or who speak with impediments. Your phone may be great at deciphering your drunk-ass request for a cab at 9 p.m. on a Tuesday, but that's because it's been trained on a few happy hour voices just to deal with that particular instance.*

Your phone has not been trained to talk to you after your face underwent reconstructive surgery, messing with your speech. Or when you can't speak at all because you can't hear. The problem is that speech recognition technology hasn't been trained on sign language.

Deep Forest Deep Dream Mandala by Nora Berg

Along comes this gentleman, who basically mixes a Nintendo Wii with an Amazon Alexa to allow anyone using sign language to communicate with their omniscient overlords.

The way he does it is really clever though, as he uses a publicly available neural net to (literally?) teach the network sign language, whereupon he further develops that recognized sign language into text, and then ties it all to a text-to-speech program, which can then finally talk to Alexa.

What I want to know is, how long do I have to get this thing to watch me before it can recognize my thoughts and turn them into words so that I can finally be one with the internet??

Sign-language hack lets Amazon Alexa respond to gestures
July 2018, BBC News

Post Script
The Alcohol Language Corpus (of drunk speech)

Between 2007 and 2009, linguistic researchers from the Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Institute of Legal Medicine in Munich in Germany convinced 162 men and women to get drunk [and talk Drunken John into a voice recorder].
-Fast Company

Post Post Script
I'm sure I concur with everyone else who is saying that Alex Grey is the only artist where Deep Dream makes his work look worse! Still, how is it that I can't find more of it online? Also, can't someone train a network on his paintings instead of the corpus they used for Deep Dream?

Alex Grey Meets Deep Dream

Alex Grey As Himself

Post Post Post
Accidental robot-hole. I should know way more about neural style transfers, which came out last year and as an extension of the Deep Dream project.

Style transfer is where you anti(?)train a neural net to overfit for a particular style, and then fit that style onto a new image. It makes way more sense when you see it.

Here, a painting of Napoleon, trained on Raphael's School of Athens:

Meta Napoleon Bonapart, unknown origin

Here, a famous Escher painting trained also on the School of Athens:

Deep Escher in Athens, unknown origin

Neil Degrasse Tyson x Kandinsky

Brad Pitt x Duchamp(?)

Abstract Cat

Here's a place that will do it for you, but they have their own pre-designed style templates (called pastiches) - Deep Art

There's also a few apps that do it, Prisma is one.

And finally, don't forget who started this all:

Abstraction of a Cow, Theo van Doesburg, circa 1900

Abstraction of a Tree, curated from Piet Mondrian, circa 1900

This Internet Secret Will Make You Crazy

Gotcha! If you're reading this, then you obviously clicked, which makes you a lot more like everyone else than you thought you were, unless you already thought you were.

This phrase "will make you" is the number one choice for writers trying to bait readers into clicking their article, and it's twice as strong as all the others.

For the most part, I could give a crap about search engine optimization and clicks. Maybe I should, since I'm trying to sell a book on my other blog. Nonetheless, I could care less. But I was looking up SEO tips just to make sure I don't care.

And now I'm sure I don't care about SEO on my website. What I found in the meantime will make you cry. Just kidding, that's another clickbait headline. I found this handy graph that lists the most irresistible headlines.

Headlines aren't the only thing. There's a few things you can do to get your site more traffic. First of all, you need to put original data on there. Do some research, make your results look pretty, and post it up. Then people will go to your page because you have something nobody else does. Pretty sure I haven't much original research on here, except for some pictures here and there.

You can also beg other people to link back to your page from their own sites. Being that my site is anonymous, I don't see myself asking anyone for endorsements.

Or you can make sure your posts are 1900 words. That's a bit too long for me.

And finally, you can post naked pictures of yourself. Just kidding.

And finally, you can use headlines that grab hold of people's limbic system, taking control of their motor cortex and making them share, like, and retweet the sh** out of your content as if it was actually good.

I met a friend of a friend once who worked for a digital news outlet in our area; his job every morning was to go on Google trends, find all the buzzwords, and rearrange all the articles on their site to use those words, probably embedded in these catchy phrases you see above. That sounds like a cool job, despite the fact that I find something wrong with all this.

There's something about it that seems unfair. As a teacher all my life up until recently, I always had a strong urge to empower people's minds and diffuse confusion. Behavioral psychology is a powerful thing, and with it, yes I'm going to say it, comes great responsibility. Maybe a part of me believes that once you discover a trick like this, you can only use it for good, not to make money, or to influence politics, or to get yourself a date.

But if you could care less about responsibility or morals or enriching the minds of others to be more powerful and less susceptible to deceit as opposed to taking advantage of those breaches in our mental fortitude, then this stuff is for you. Game on!