There are many good cats on the internet. There are celebrity cats like Lil Bub, mysterious spectral cats like Maru, there are many funny videos of cats, there are cartoon cats, there are cats who are hanging from trees. There are baby cats. Recently, dogs may have overtaken cats in internet popularity, but cats are still the lingua franca of the internet.
Thus, while the programmer Christopher Hesse has used Google’s machine learning technology to create a tool that will translate line drawings of buildings and handbags into realistic photographs, we are only concerned with his cat-creating toy. Hesse’s program scanned some 2,000 images of cats, and uses what it learned from the relationships of those images to translate your simple line drawing into a monstrous blob of fur and eyes.
Here are the A.V. Club’s adorable crew of furballs, many of which seem to have absorbed a twin or two in the womb.
What about a cat in a fun, furry, possibly sentient hat!
Or Cat Stevens?
Here’s Max Rebo, from the Mos Eisley Cantina:
We tried a couple dogs:
The latter of which seemed to unlock some long-held evil.
Finally, we completed the circle, accidentally turning proto-cat Garfield into Nermal:
Google’s foray into machine learning is inspiring stuff that could lead to breakthroughs in the way we do pretty much everything, but in the meantime it is is doing a great job providing stupid shit for the internet to play with. To make your own hellish cat monster, scroll down to “edges2cats,” hit clear, and begin drawing. Do not blame us for what results.