Show HN: RoastMe.io – A neural network that has learned to insult | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: RoastMe.io – A neural network that has learned to insult

roastme.io

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Here's how I suspect this thing works:

[1]: Crawl reddit.com/r/roastme

[2]: Map images to an array of "roast" comments

[3]: Compare input photo to all images from [2]

[4]: Return top three roasts from most similar image

Pretty neat, though! I've got to caution people on sharing this with coworkers as there's a very high risk of NSFW racial/ethnic/gender humor.

I posted in r/roastme about a year ago, and when I uploaded my photo it said the same comments that were in the thread. Funny that it recognized me.

"504 Gateway Time-out / nginx/1.10.1 (Ubuntu)" what kind of insult is that?

Hahaha, we're just getting too much traffic. We've added more compute, should be better now!

Hi, Could you reveal what you used to train the model ?

The subreddit ?

Yes, the subreddit was used.

"You look like Kevin Smith fucked Mario and then you developed a heroin addiction. "

"Your face is rounder than the "O" in your sign "

"I thought we already roasted Saddam Hussein."

The image I uploaded:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/Einstein...

> You look like Kevin Smith fucked Mario and then you developed a heroin addiction

Awful but hilarious! I tried googling this one with quotes and couldn't find any matches for the whole or large portions of the jokes, unlike some of the other jokes in this thread. Is this one an original joke?

It might be! If a joke makes less sense, it probably is original.

It gave me

    1. Be Black
    2. Get Welfare
    3. Ask people to roast you.

Fully-automated racism.

...okay, seriously, you went to a site who's stated purpose is to be insulting, and you're surprised when it says distasteful things? What did you expect?

From his writing, it doesn't sound like he's angry, just sharing what he got from using the site.

lmao

> Fully-automated racism.

I'm not sure what else one would expect from an automated “roasting” whose input is a photo.

It's not like it's working from a bio or CV.

    > your hair is dumb and your glasses make you look like a frog

    > you're black, so you must be on welfare

Sometimes spurious usage of machine learning is "cute" and can be massaged by its implementer to come across as a valid instance of more art than science. Other times, it manages to let people who want to play with off-the-shelf libraries muddy the waters of what really comprises a quite difficult specialization. Other times still, it helps to reinforce some of the more atrocious biases of its source material and hold up another needless mirror to the uglier sides of humanity that no one is ignorant of.

Your project has managed to both. Well done. Have you heard about this really cool game called Cards Against Humanity?

Username checks out ;)

We had three main intentions with this project, two of them which you've mentioned. This was a hackathon project, and we decided not to go the generic route of what usually wins at such events. We wanted to have fun, and enjoy the process of creation. We ended up insulting our judges, and came last place :)

That only shows how bad the judges were. Kudos!

Thats hilarious! The last hackathon I was in went similarly: we built an ML-powered sign language app and lost to something a team copied from an Instructable lol

> Sometimes [...]. Other times, [...]. Other times, [...].

> Your project has managed to both.

Which two? Or did you mean, “all three” rather than “both”?

Well it thinks Kirk Douglas [1] has a chin beard. The other insults eluded my understanding:

"well the good news is, youll totally be able to pay off all that medical debt with your art degree."

"You remind me of when I draw faces on my thumb."

"Oh fuck man, you have that disease that makes you think that a chin beard looks acceptable. Are you alright? How are your parents taking it?"

[1] https://www.biography.com/.image/t_share/MTE4MDAzNDEwNTA3MTA...

All three are top comments here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/RoastMe/comments/4h1hj2/so_i_heard_...

So much for a neural network.

Maybe it's just trained on full comments, not the composing words?

So it finds similar images to a person and shows those comments?

Usually, but sometimes not.

Combined into one image for a quick comparison: https://i.imgur.com/ery4SA1.jpg

It's conditioned to output replays way more than make new jokes. But it does make new jokes occasionally.

That sounds just like Reddit tbh.

I am of Indian origin, I got:

  "Uh yeah, let me get 20 on pump 3 please. Thanks goopta."
  "You look like you date rape goats."
  "Sorry you got in trouble for making that clock."

Automated racism! :o

Yeah, I uploaded a picture of my Chinese friend with a phone and it said “I thought you’d be sick of that after so many years at the factory” and “The space between your eyes could fill the entire great wall of China”

It does seem quite racist. Which is even more uncomfortable if that’s unintentional, if you think about it.

The AI is fed from the roastme subreddit, where these kinds of comments will appear consentually at times (to my knowledge), so it's not surprising the AI picked up on it.

I'm of Indian origin, too, but only one of my three comments was related to my skin colour:

'We all know you work in a call center in India. Thank you for writing roastme on the back of your I.T paper work. Get back to work "Steve".'

The others were generic as far as I could tell.

Rude

(but accurate https://i.imgur.com/kCPdTTB.png)

If you are able to reveal something of the architecture, is this just classifying the image based off other similar images from r/roastme, and then outputting a random insult that was deemed acceptable for that classification of image? Like there's no NLP happening here, correct?

It's a very generic off-the-shelf CNN + LSTM, with a few bells and whistles.

Not responding for me right now. HN did it in, maybe?

Yeap, traffic is high. Our GPUs are whirring. Keep trying!

Not bad.

https://i.imgur.com/qaK3x1B.png

Does this thing detect ethnicity? Because the roasts were on point.

It's usually racist.

Yeah I tested a few images and it seems pretty accurate in detecting race/ethnicity. I wonder where they collected all of the insults from.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RoastMe/

It seems to switch off between thinking I'm Mexican and thinking I'm Arab, neither of which are true. It also thinks I'm a Trump voter (I'm not), and that there is a roll of toilet paper in the photo I uploaded (there isn't)

totally detects ethnicity.

How did you set up your back end here? (what's taking the photos and running the algorithms on them)

Is there something off the shelf you've used?

Great site by the way, I'm impressed.

This is awesome, thanks for sharing. I've been doing it with a few friends and we all love it.

Can you link to the reddit comments? It'd be interesting to see the photos they are roasting

Well i tried it with and without glasses.

It really homes in on glasses...

How do you know people upload pictures of themselves? What if this becomes a tool for bullies?

Wont load for me

Seems to only work in Chrome :/

Besides that: Hilarious site!

this web site it a piece of garbage. literally not a site.

it was a roast people

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