This Website Will Turn Your Cat Doodles Into Unmitigated Nightmare Fuel, And The Internet Is All Over It

lolcatcomputer_Shutterstock-cropped
Shutterstock

Trust us, this was a much better picture to use than the horrors below.

Were you amusingly horrified by MIT’s Nightmare Machine or Google’s Deep Dream but thought they needed a certain je ne sais quoi only a cat can provide? Christopher Hesse has your back with Pix2pix-tensorflow, a machine-learning based widget that brings your cat doodles to kill-it-with-fire life using about 2,000 stock photos of cats and absolutely no qualms about recreating the same heebie-jeebies Run The Jewels’ “Meowpurrdy” gave us.

The program isn’t only a cat generator, though. Its algorithm for generating photos of buildings, for example, works surprisingly well, and there’s also a generator for handbags and shoes. But what’s the fun of an algorithm that works okay? The Internet longs for hilarious nightmare fuel, and Pix2pix’s cat image generator delivered.

It can even ruin a good perfectly good cat drawing.

We decided to try one. (You can also try it out here.) Ours came out a little “WE LIKE THE MOON.

Twitter and Metafilter had fun with the image generator as well:

Someone’s got a case of the Mondays.

Say cheese. Or scream it.

Life finds a way.

One fine day with a purr and a purr, a baby was born and it caused a little stir. (Yes, I remember the CatDog theme song by heart. Don’t @ me.)

One can of cat, coming right up.

Was that a Warhol reference? Probably not, but others delved into art history with the generator:

https://twitter.com/fromabasement/status/834229441610055681

https://twitter.com/ranjit/status/834228156504604673/photo/1

Some of them (well, most of them) veered into “eldritch horrors” territory:

https://twitter.com/joshmillard/status/834202158127943680/photo/1

And the most horrifying one of all…

(Via Affine Layer, Metafilter, Neatorama, and Kotaku)