Not long ago this summer, a blog post from Google Research hit the web and went viral.

That's a bit of an unusually dry source for a post to catch fire, but the subject of the post was quite unusual as well: Google software engineers had somewhat inadvertently created a neural net AI that could turn any image into abstract pieces of psychedelic art.

They called it "DeepDream."

(Photo : GoogleResearch)

Artificial Creative Intelligence

The original intention was to figure out techniques to teach artificial neural networks to analyze and recognize patterns in photos, based on a vast database of millions of everyday images of animals, people, sea life, you name it.

The program would look at an image, try to find patterns that resembled those familiar images, and enhance them, making them more visible. But when researchers told the algorithm to repeat the process over and over, it created "a feedback loop," as they explained on the Google Research blog.

"If a cloud looks a little bit like a bird, the network will make it look more like a bird. This in turn will make the network recognize the bird even more strongly on the next pass and so forth, until a highly detailed bird appears, seemingly out of nowhere."

The results were surprising, surreal, sometimes frightening, and sometimes very artful. It was like they had created artificial visual creativity.

(Photo : GoogleResearch)

Yes, Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

Then Google released the source code for DeepDream, and the developers at Dreamify used it to made an Instagram-style app with no delay. Available for iOS and Android, Dreamify can turn any image from your gallery, or anything you snap a picture of, into a weird beautiful AI nightmare/dream-image.

Unlike the cutting-edge AI it's based on, Dreamify is easy to figure out within a few seconds.

Like Instagram, Dreamify comes with pre-programmed filters you can apply to any photo quickly and easily -- it's just that these filters are out of this world. You can also customize any filter with just a few controls and experiment with how wild you want your DeepDream image to get.

(Photo : Screenshots / Robert Schoon)

Photos are posted to Dreamify's image gallery, where you can get lost for hours perusing through other users' contributions. You can also share or post your photos across other apps, platforms, and services.

What's even better, you can toggle any filter on or off of any photo just by tapping it. (This is especially handy if DeepDream has altered the original beyond any recognition, but you're curious to see the original.)