Four Experiments in Handwriting with a Neural Network by Shan Carter, David Ha, Ian Johnson, and Chris Olah.
While the handwriting experiments are compelling and entertaining, the author’s have a more profound goal for this activity:
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The black box reputation of machine learning models is well deserved, but we believe part of that reputation has been born from the programming context into which they have been locked into. The experience of having an easily inspectable model available in the same programming context as the interactive visualization environment (here, javascript) proved to be very productive for prototyping and exploring new ideas for this post.As we are able to move them more and more into the same programming context that user interface work is done, we believe we will see richer modes of human-ai interactions flourish. This could have a marked impact on debugging and building models, for sure, but also in how the models are used. Machine learning research typically seeks to mimic and substitute humans, and increasingly it’s able to. What seems less explored is using machine learning to augment humans. This sort of complicated human-machine interaction is best explored when the full capabilities of the model are available in the user interface context.
Setting up a search alert for future work from these authors!