Neural nest: AI-generated pigeon breeds

I’d been vaguely aware of pigeons until I read my friend Rosemary Mosco’s book A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching.

Now I’m in love.

And so in honor of my newfound appreciation of pigeons, I decided to generate some never-before-seen pigeon breeds. And to my unending delight, @birdandmoon agreed to help me!

She collected 42 real pigeon breeds with interesting names, like “Hungarian Giant House Pigeon” and “Archangel” and “Fish-eye Roller”. Then I gave the list to a couple of neural networks, giant internet-trained models that are part of gpt-3. They’re trained to complete text, so given a list of interesting pigeon breeds, they generally try to come up with new and equally interesting-sounding breeds. Here are some of our favorites, illustrated by Rosemary Mosco herself:

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I love them all.

And if you or the pigeon fanciers in your life would like to learn more about real pigeons, I recommend you check out Rosemary’s charming and informative book.

You can find other fun science and nature cartoons at Rosemary’s website, birdandmoon.com.

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