Your Halloween-costume ideas are probably bad. (Unless you are doing one of our cheap-meme-costumes ideas, which are all good.) Why not let a neural network make one up for you?
Janelle Shane, who programs neural networks to produce ideas mainly for the jokes, decided to have readers submit ideas for costumes, then trained a neural network to come up with its own costume ideas. After receiving more than 4,500 submissions, her neural network got to work.
Neural networks train themselves, and early results were nearly nonsensical, like “Sexy Purbie Lampire,” “The Wombue,” and “The Ran Spean Sexy Sexy Pon Sexy Dander.” Shane’s neural network obviously understood the idea that “sexy” was an important concept for Halloween costumes, but was a little lost beyond that.
But given a little time, it started to figure things out, with ideas like “A costume,” “Sexy Menus,” and “Frankenstein’s Denter.” After even more time, it came up with ideas that came very, very close to making sense:
Martian Devil
Panda Clam
Potato Man
Shark Cow
Space Batman
The Shark Knight
Snape Scarecrow
Gandalf the Good Witch
Professor Panda
Strawberry Shark
Vampire Big Bird
Samurai Angel
Lady Garbage
Pirate Firefighter
Fairy Batman
But it never really seemed to crack the core concept behind a sexy costume:
Sexy Scare
Sexy the Pumpkin
Saxy Pumpkins
Sexy the Pirate
Sexy Pumpkin Pirate
Sexy Gumb Man
Sexy Barber
Sexy Gargles
Sexy Humblebee
Sexy the Gate
Sexy Lamp
Sexy Ducty Monster
Sexy Conchpaper
Sexy the Bumble
Sexy the Super Bass
Pretty Zombie Space Suit
Sexy Drangers
Sexy the Spock
Still, “Samurai Angel” or “Saxy Pumpkins” is going to be better than any variation on “Cash Me Outside” you’ve been planning. Just let the computer do the work, man.
