Text reproduction with machine learning
| Text reproduction with machine learning | |
|---|---|
| Name | Text reproduction with machine learning |
| Location | De Bonte Zwaan |
| Date | 2018/07/31 |
| Time | 10:00-17:00 |
| PeopleOrganisations | Moritz Ebeling |
| Type | HDSA2018 |
| Web | Yes |
| No | |
In the era of data, intelligence and computing, the authenticity of any digital content is not longer guaranteed. With machine learning technology, a human voice can be imitated, a moving image can be manipulated in real time, texts can be phrased by using raw data. All to make up something „real“. To get a glimpse of what’s going on, we built our own deep learning network! In this workshop, we trained a given neural network on original text to reproduce it, remixed it, produced more of it. Sometimes the output was complete rubbish, sometimes the algorithm repeated passgages from the original. But certainly it invented or rehashed content based on the given input, so who is faking whom?
This workshop was fun for beginners and pros!
For this workshop we needed:
- A computer + power plug
- To know where to find your computer’s Terminal or Console
- To have Python 3.6 installed (1)
- We used Tensorflow, so if you’re cool with Python, you could install it on forehand, otherwise we did it during the workshop or in advance.
- Text material that you wanted to feed the machine with. This could be text that you had written yourself or found somewhere. Short text passages were internalized by the machine very quickly. Some brought excerpts, a few pages or a book. The texts were remix, reproduce and produce more of. Some texts that were used: The Communist Mannifesto by Karl Marx, the scripts from all Harry Potter movies, The Cyborg Manifesto from Donna Haraway, some newspapers headlines. We needed the text in .txt files, but you can use formats like Markdown or XML like syntax to define headlines, paragraphs, bullet points, quotes. You can format the text however you like, as long as it's in one or many .txt files.
(1) For beginners, this is a quite heavy task to either find out which version you have installed or to update to version 3.
