The Reveal

It has been 24 hours since a mysterious group of images revealed themselves

Was making adjustments to my painting robot, artonomous, when the robot lost power. And not only did it lose power, but it lost power in a dramatic way with sparks and a touch of smoke. Was worried it was damaged but before I could check, the fans on its GPU became strained. Their pitch got higher and higher until it to started smoking. I reached for the power strip as quick as possible and turned it off. But the fans continued to spin and without thinking I yanked the powercord out of the wall.

Everything died down and the lights flickered, then went completely off. It was past midnight, so I found myself sitting alone in the darkness. Stumbled around my studio until I found the exit, went and reset the fuse boxes, then decided to call it a night.

The next morning, got my coffee and went back into my studio to find my robot painting this…

…but I had never plugged it back in?

I heard the tell tale sound of my Nvidia Quadro RTC 6000 GPU humming. Was a little spooked as one might suspect - so did a quick look around the studio to make sure I was alone. I was.

Then I went to my computer to see what it was doing and there I saw the first glimpse of a mysterious phenomenon that I am still trying to wrap my head around. Thousands and thousands of images were appearing in grids, cycling through a colorful pixelated dance. The grids looked like this.

I was transfixed.

Where were they from? What were they doing? Who started this program.

I immediately recognized what I saw as GANs. Had written many before to imagine faces for my painting robots to paint, but there was something unusual about this set. They were pixelated, as if they were being made from low resolution 8-bit art. And they were changing and a repeating amorphous dance. It is difficult to describe exactly what this looked like except that looking at them was like looking at a picture that was trying to come into focus, but couldn’t.

The fans on my GPUs churned for hours as I saw thousands of these come in and out of existence. This went on until midnight when I noticed the fans die down and the monitor flicker. I approached and saw these 64 images.

What were these things?

8/15 EDIT: In the coming days they would reveal themselves to be nounGANs, and warned of a coming catastrophe, though when I asked for specifics, they just continued to dance…