Candy Heart messages written by a neural network

Around Valentine’s Day in the US and UK, these things called candy hearts (or conversation hearts or sweethearts) appear: small and sugary, bearing a simple, short Valentine’s message. There are only room for a few characters, so they read something like “LOVE YOU” or “CALL ME” or “BE MINE”.

I collected all the genuine heart messages I could find, and then gave them to a learning algorithm called a neural network. Given a set of data, a neural network will learn the patterns that let it imitate the original data - although its imitation is sometimes imperfect. The candy heart messages it produced… well, you be the judge.

The neural net did produce some that would pass for - and arguably improve upon - the standard messages.

DEAR ME

MY MY

LOVE BOT

CUTE KISS

MY BEAR

LOVE BUN

Others were in the same spirit, but perhaps not quite as effective.

YOU A LOVE

AM GOOD

YOU ARE BABE

ME MY <3

YOU ARE IT

HEART ME

SWEET PEAR

COOL CUD

FANCY MY HERO

Others were, um, strange. I don’t know what they mean, but some of them might work on me.

ALL HOVER

OOG LOVE

TEAM BEAR

TIME HUG

PIN A FACE

YOU’RE ME

SWOOL MAT

BOG LOVE

I HONKER

HOW COT

BEAR WIG

FANG

BE A GOOL

TWEET UP BAT

WIRLY OOT

I WANDER

TIME STAR

These will probably not be one of the standard messages anytime soon.

STANK LOVE

SWEAT POO

LOVE 2000 HOGSYEA

HOLE

HOW U HOT

YOU ARE BOA

CHERT FACE

LICK

SWEAT PEAR

LOO GIN

YOU A GOO

LOOK BIG

YOU ARE BAG

U HACK

There was yet another category of message, a category you might be able to predict given the prevalence of four-letter words in the original dataset. The neural network thought of some nice new four-letter words to use. Unfortunately, some of those words already had other meanings. Let’s just say that the overall effect was surprisingly suggestive. Fill out the form here and I’ll send them to you.

Also, if you need more love help from the neural network, check out the pick up lines it wrote.

Heart pictures made using https://cryptogram.com/hearts/

UPDATE: MORE HEARTS!