New neural net snakes

There’s a kind of neural network that learns to imitate whatever text you give it, whether that’s recipes, song lyrics, or even the names of guinea pigs.

Their imitations are often imperfect (they only know what’s in their dataset and therefore end up accidentally coming up with things that they don’t know are bad ideas). But one area where they tend to do well is inventing new species of things. The neural net’s birds were entirely believable, and its fish were generally no stranger than the species that already exist. So for my next project, I decided to generate some snakes.

I collected English common names for about 1,000 snakes and started training.

The first thing I noticed is that its snake names were a lot more noticeably fake than its birds or fish - the snake dataset is way smaller, so it had much fewer examples to learn from.

Tostlesnake

Sine cobra

Snoked snake

Cancan rattlesnake

Chippen’s putter python

Southern coat snake

Pinkwarm’s Copperanada

Smart sea snake

Western Nack

Blonded snake

Ham’s Pattlescops

Green tree nosh Snake

Hecker’s sea snake

Ned-scaled tree viper

Barned dater Snake

Smalle’s mock ractlesnake

Bland brown snake

Corned python

Common bust viper

Smorthead Garter Snake

Some snakes did approach the level of believability. You might be able to bluff some herpetologists into thinking these are real.

Many-nosed Snake

Cornhead snake

Arizona liger snake

Mangbow’s Earth Snake

Wing snake

Banded gutter snake

Jacucan balm snake

Banded guff adder

Bamboo tire snake

Rave hognose Snake

Tree-nosed adder

Bland-headed tree snake



Good luck with these, though.

Texan farter snake

Shite snake

Spitty rattlesnake

Thing snake

Brown brown Black Snake

Tamestail farter Snake

Black-neded tampon

Madeshine spite- racer

Bognia scat snake

I also decided to see what would happen if I trained a neural net both on snakes AND on Halloween costumes. Pleasingly, here are some of the snakes it came up with:

Wonder snake

Fairy rattlesnake

The Spacer Snake

Robo snake

Sexy cobra

Bob dog tree Snake



I had way too much fun generating those, and ended up generating more than would fit here. If you’d like to read the rest of them (and optionally get bonus material every time I post), enter your email here.