Janelle Shane has trained a text generating neural network on knitting patterns (kindly contributed by Ravelry users and Stitch-Maps) and the results are hilariously absurd. The neural network has been named SkyKnit.
I tested two of these:
- “mystery lace (copy)”; the training set does include patterns for tentacled toys, but these tentacles below are probably a consequence of SkyKnit’s inability to keep stitch counts consistent across rows. This one had some success on Twitter 🙂
- “snowing leaves”, a pretty convincing attempt at a lace motif
SkyKnit has better performance when trained exclusively on Stitchmap patterns, which are written in a standard and consistent way, as opposed to ordinary patterns which often include natural language alongside the knitting instructions.
datasock 