Once upon a time I painted a lot. I won some minor awards in high school, and I almost studied art in college. But the closest I ever got was watching Terry Zwigoff’s 2006 satire Art School Confidential.

It’s a about a wide-eyed college freshman whose idealism is beaten out of him by the pettiness, cynicism, and insecurity of the institution and its people. I decided to try to become an engineer instead.

From recipes to paint colour names to Hearthstone cards, everything is better when you make a bot do it. Check out how this machine-learning algorithm named locations on the Fortnite map.

Dungeons & Dragons is full of mixed up creatures like owlbears, which are half bear and half owl, and perytons, the deer-headed eagles of your dreams and nightmares. D&D creatures generated by a neural network are even weirder.

A lot of the time, video game names sound like they were generated by a machine. So, I decided to see if I could teach a neural network to name a game.