Annalee Newitz writing for Ars Technica
The longer it processed the dataset, the closer the algorithm got to making legit color names, though they were still mostly surreal: "Soreer Gray" is a kind of greenish color, and "Sane Green" is a purplish blue. When Shane cranked up "creativity" on the algorithm's output, it gave her a violet color called "Dondarf" and a Kelly green called "Bylfgoam Glosd." After churning through several more iterations of this process, Shane was able to get the algorithm to recognize some basic colors like red and gray, "though not reliably," because she also gets a sky blue called "Gray Pubic" and a dark green called "Stoomy Brown."
In the end, she concludes: "1. The neural network really likes brown, beige, and grey; 2. The neural network has really, really bad ideas for paint names." Possibly the neural network needed better parameters, but really, who can argue with results like these?
There's still room for human creativity in this computerized world.