The Valentine’s Day holiday, which I do not take seriously, has often provided entertainment value. (What was that? Oh, yes, I was ‘married’ for a VERY long time. But also no: I believe in love, just not as a reason to sell pink things.)
My favorite piece of entertainment with this holiday theme is Janelle Shane’s 2018 comedic adventure in attempting to train a neural network to make candy heart statements.
Candy Heart messages written by a neural network
Around Valentine’s Day in the US and UK, these things called candy hearts (or conversation hearts or sweethearts) appear: small and sugary, bearing a simple, short Valentine’s message. There are only room for a few characters, so they read something like “LOVE YOU” or “CALL ME” or “BE MINE”.
Many of these are… remarkable, and unlikely to have a positive effect on your beloved unless they have a unique sense of humor.
I think my favorite in the harmless category is:
Dr. Shane also provides a link to the candy heart image generator (cryptogram.com/hearts), which is useful for my types of niche purposes. 🙂