To discern and process the billions of photos that pass through its site, Google engineers designed ingenious tools known as artificial neural networks, or ‘ANNs’.

Google’s ANNs are programmed, through an endless stream of similar photos, to recognize objects within images by their distinctive characteristics. For example, the ANN will be taught to recognize a fork by processing millions of pictures of forks – eventually understanding that it has a handle and two to four times.

Now Google is offering the public these networks’ codes – allowing people to upload photos and mutate them into terrifying and wonderful versions of the original.

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