I trained an AI to generate German placenames

Last week, while on vacation, I read Dan Hon’s post on generating British placenames using a Torch RNN.

“I can do this, too” or more accurately “das kann ich auch”, I thought and resolved to try this as soon as I got home from my trip (packing too much computing power and relaxation do not mix).

The instructions in Dan’s post are quite easy to follow, I just went with the docker image (remember to set -gpu -1 at the end of every command line).

You can download the Excel or plain text data files (not CSV, but easy enough to clean up with a little bit of sed-fu and then train your RNN. In the next step, you can then generate long lists of German-sounding place names like this one.

To make things even more believable, create little postcards for each of the towns using Adobe Spark.