Janelle Shane is continuing her experiments with neural nets naming things. She’s even found a practical use for them: naming guinea pigs. It turns out that naming things with a neural net is a good way to drum up attention for animal rescue adoptions.

Generative methods are pretty useful for coming up with names. While it’s not a daily need for most of us, there are a number of practical uses for a name generator: picking project code names, creating test data, coming up with an original but pronounceable name for a drug, and–in this case–naming rescued animals.

She didn’t stop with guinea pigs. Her other recent experiments include Star Wars planets, sports teams, Harry Potter fanfic summaries, and better paint colors.

Janelle’s posts typically have quite a lot of details about how they arrived at the output. I found the discussion of the paint colors particularly interesting, since she goes over the changes she made to try to find paint names that matched the color swatches better. If you’re familiar with neural nets some of the concepts–like temperature and using better data-sets–won’t be surprising. But it’s useful to see how they’re applied to move the output in a particular direction.