Is This The Most High Tech Music Video Of All Time?

Google got artistic in the summer of 2015, and just as art mimics life, these artist mimicked Google. Check out the music video created with Google’s DeepDream technologies.
DeepDream was presented to the world much like any other announcement from Google: via a blog post. From there the technology hit the social media headlines, and exploded into popular culture. DeepDream uses the artificial neural networks that Google has been exploring as a better way of recognizing speech and images. The software takes a video or image and looks for familiar patterns within its database. From there it replaces the familiar patterns and creates a psychedelic images while maintaining the basic structure of the original photo.  
This artificial intelligence can be used to create digital nightmares or beautiful landscapes depending on what the software sees. Popular Science featured an article on DeepDream and explained how the process works;  
“In the case of the Google Images ANN, Google’s developers taught this artificial intelligence hive mind how to recognize certain objects by showing them repeated examples of said object. For example, after seeing a bunch of pictures of starfish, the program would begin to understand that a starfish is typically a shape with five triangular points, and an orange color. The team realized that this same program could be used to also generate images of those things.”
For those who want to try out DeepDream for themselves, Google has released the source code of the software to the public as an open sourced project, allowing anyone to use the it to create their own dream images.
You can make your own DeepDream masterpiece with Google’s dreamscape generator. Simply upload the picture that you want to dreamscape and in a few seconds your photo will be transformed. Be warned that just like dreams, the results are not always pleasant.   
British band Years & Years have used the high tech software to create one of their latest videos. The band’s DeepDream music video for their song “Desire (Gryffin Remix)” can be seen in full below:

Years & Years frontman Olly Alexander told TechCrunch: “We were fascinated and intrigued (and kind of terrified in a good way) by the concept of using AI to interpret a music video, It’s exciting to be part of this cutting edge technology and we hope our fans enjoy the crazy visuals as much as we do.”
While Years & Years aren’t the first to use DeepDream in video, they are the first to create a major music video from it. Many other DeepDream projects have been circulating through Twitter and Facebook, like this one that blends the trippy sounds of Pink Floyd with Space Odyssey:

DeepDream is one of the first steps in what will be a long line of artificial intelligence programs created to help computers use the information stored within databases to ‘learn’ and provide better answers to the questions that users ask.
Google has been a pioneer in the creation of AI projects like DeepDream and RankBrain, a software created to assist search engines when faced with colloquial terms. In the coming years we are sure to see an increase of AI developments all created to make our online experience easier and more efficient. Let’s  just hope that not all of them produce the psychedelic nightmares of DeepDream.

For more DeepDream creations search #DeepDream on Twitter, and while you’re at it let us know what you think or show us your own creations @Midphase.