Google has set its terrifying, dreaming image robots on the public

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Google has opened up its image recognising robots to anybody — letting people create strange, horrifying images out of their own pictures.

Google released the half-horrifying, half-amazing pictures that it had created itself last week, with pictures including a knight made of dogs. Now the company has made the “Deep Dream” software available on code-sharing website Github, where anyone can download it and run their own pictures through it.

The software works by turning the image recognising computers on themselves. By telling the systems to over-interpret images, they would pick out otherwise meaningless things and exaggerate them — turning clouds into bizarre llamas, for instance.

As with Google’s own images, the pictures tend to transform thing into animals — with dogs being a particular favourite — and eyes. They also tend to overlay everything with a swirly rainbow colouring.

"It'll be interesting to see what imagery people are able to generate," wrote the Google engineers in the post introducing the tool. "If you post images to Google+, Facebook, or Twitter, be sure to tag them with #deepdream so other researchers can check them out too."