Nails by A.I.
So the folks on Ravelry’s LSG forum are quickly becoming some of my favorite people on the Internet. They enabled the fiber-wrangling wonder that is SkyKnit, feeding it a dataset of knitting patterns to learn from and then turning its mistake-prone patterns into hilarious reality. They’re hard at work collecting a dataset of crochet hats for SkyKnit’s sibling, HAT3000. And it turns out there’s an (also 18+) sister group of LSG folks who are also nail polish fanciers, and who have amassed large personal lists of nail polish colors. Why? I don’t know, but it’s a machine learning algorithm’s dream.
The nail polish fanciers (the group is called “There’s Fiber in My Polish”) graciously contributed their name collections to the cause, filling a spreadsheet with several thousand entries in just a few hours. I already knew that neural networks can generate paint colors, but this is the first time I’d tried to get colors out of a neural network that was previously trained on metal bands.
Thanks to its head start on the rules of spelling English words, this algorithm didn’t go through the usual alphabet soup phase of learning about vowels and spaces. It did, however, go through an initial phase where it produced nail polish colors like this:
Murder Earth Blue Slaughter All Death Bear Hollow Orange Flay Pink Silence I Dared Sacred Rose Mange Opal You Death Pink The Foull Sea of Leather Stray Color Eye Claw Green Chambers of Flame Shades of Flesh Brutally Bright Mind Machine Blue Dirty Flesh Night Burphouse of Poppy Transis
As it learned more about nail polish names, though, it gradually forgot about its dark past - this phenomenon is called “catastrophic forgetting” and is part of the reason that machine learning algorithms have to specialize at one task at a time.
It started creating polish names that were actually pretty believable:
Purple Skystone Shimmerelle Sweet Eclipse Neon Sunshine Fire In the Starry Fell Moonland Purple That Orange Spice OMG Power Indigo Dragon Flame Dust Plummerine Teal Moon Sunblaster Neon Pow
Several would also make good names for punk bands:
Ink Flame Electric Frost Blue Wine Fire Splat Batberry Lime Force Bike String Neon Mint Alice Twilight Mashery Charming Machine Butter Street Mind Sparkle Shattered Girls Lead Not the Poppy
Nail polish names can be very strange (“I’d never eat your brains,” “Hands Off My Kielbasa!” “My Gecko Does Tricks,” “Fishwife”), but these would give even the strangest a run for their money:
Bloshing Glip Pants of Sun Bat in Love Grinch Pink Clearly Stare’s Hoot Mews, New Universe Science Stars Pickwool Mint Space Holly Gold Be Tangeling The Green is In the Be Glitter Metallic With All of the Alive Pant Summer Up of the mangle Don’t Man Splat Grape Have Dorkanna Angel Wants Magic Sharker I’m the Sunshiple Little Dangest Street Dance Pants Pickles Green Candy in Santa Girls Burblipp Collide Loopstorm Ink-Orange Me, Orange Chunky The Midnight Doodle What Hello Glake Decisonator
And of course there was an entire category of names that will probably not catch on.
Love Rot Fail Pink Wart Boy Blood 204 Dead Pearl Social Mace Mooned Black Old With Anger Suffering Lights Acid Touch Green Evil Gold Charming Tick Diamond Flesh Song of the Booty Sorry Green Fail The Baby Sore Love Diamond Pink Ashes in the Green Creamscrap Golden Bop Dragon
Were there names that were even worse? Heck yeah. You can read them, plus a few other bonus names, at the “There’s Fiber in My Polish” group, or you can enter your email here and I’ll send them to you.
You can already order neural network-generated nail polish colors - Dreamland Lacquer is selling Stanky Bean, Clay Cow, Dorkwood, Copper Panty, and Light of Blast, all paint colors that were generated by a neural network: see here and here.
