It isn’t often that the world of Hackaday intersects with the world of crafting, which is perhaps a shame because many of the skills and techniques of the two have significant overlap. Crochet for instance has rarely featured here, but that is about to change with [Janelle Shane]’s HAT3000 neural network trained to produce crochet hat patterns.

Taking the GPT-2 neural network trained on Internet text  and further training it with a stack of crochet hat patterns, she was able to generate AI-designed hats which her friends on the Ravelry yarn forum set to crochet into real hats. It’s a follow-up to a previous knitting-based project, and instead of producing the hats you might expect it goes into flights of fancy. Some are visibly hat-like while others turn into avant-garde creations that defy any attempt to match them to real heads. A whole genre of hyperbolic progressions of crochet rows produce hats with organic folds that begin to resemble brains, and tax both the stamina of the person doing the crochet and their supply of yarn.

Perhaps most amusingly the neural network retains the ability to produce text, but when it does so it now inevitably steers the subject back to crochet hats. A Harry Potter sentence spawns a passage of something she aptly describes as “terrible crochet-themed erotica“, and such is the influence of the crochet patterns that this purple prose can even include enough crochet instructions to make them crochetable. It would be fascinating to see whether a similar model trained with G-code from Thingiverse would produce printable designs, what would an AI make with Benchy for example?

We’ve been entertained by [Janelle]’s AI work before, both naming tomato varieties, and creating pie recipes.

Thanks [Laura] for the tip.