This morning I stumbled on to the wonderfully engineered Word.Camera website via a PetaPixel blog post. The premise is simple: Convert a jpeg into somewhat meaningful English language.

To test it out I uploaded this small jpeg of my son on top of an abandoned building, silhouetted by the Sun.

It took the algorithm a few minutes to process an answer. Finally I was presented with several paragraphs of text giving a better than vague description of the image it received:

Of course, a barbed wire, a men, and an energy. Thus, the barbed wire remains unknown. The men evokes typing, and the energy is made from an enterprising or ambitious drive. Probably, the barbed wire remains unknown.

…Yet, a silhouette and a sunset: the silhouette evokes outlining, and the sunset is not the time in the evening at which the sun beginning to fall below the horizon.

Ok, it’s a little jumbled, but understandable English for anyone who has at least a slim grasp on the language. The prose has a familiar air of poetry about it and perhaps with a little human refinement could even be passed off as professional.

I spoke to David Phillips, who operated a poem a day blog in 2014 to ask his thoughts on how the computer algorithm could shake up the industry. Continue reading →