# DeepDream

- Date: 2015-06
- Type: model
- Credit: Alexander Mordvintsev / Google
- Image: https://aifilmhistory.org/carousel/deepdream/cats.jpg
- URL: https://aifilmhistory.org/entry/deepdream

Google published [Inceptionism](https://research.google/blog/inceptionism-going-deeper-into-neural-networks/) in June 2015 and the internet met DeepDream's psychedelic, dog-eyed images. Alexander Mordvintsev made the first ones by running Google's Inception classifier backwards, amplifying whatever the network half-saw in a photo. Trained on ImageNet's 120 dog breeds, everything it dreamed came out canine.

The link to video was immediate. DeepDream is iterative, and iteration is animation: run it on a frame, zoom in, feed the result back. Johan Nordberg's July 2015 "Inside an Artificial Brain" is the direct ancestor of every AI zoom video since. It was the first time a neural network's imagination had been made to move.

Links:
- Artnome — DeepDream creator unveils very first images after three years: https://www.artnome.com/news/2018/12/30/deepdream-creator-unveils-very-first-images-after-three-years
- Kanon Log — Alexander Mordvintsev, "deepdream.c," 2015/2021: https://medium.com/kanon-log/alexander-mordvintsev-deepdream-c-2015-2021-5ba5ab55f6cf
- AIArtists.org — Alexander Mordvintsev: https://aiartists.org/alexander-mordvintsev
- Wikipedia — DeepDream: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepDream
- Google Research — Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks (June 2015): https://research.google/blog/inceptionism-going-deeper-into-neural-networks/
- google/deepdream on GitHub (July 2015): https://github.com/google/deepdream
- znah/deepdream_c — the 2021 C89 rewrite: https://github.com/znah/deepdream_c
- Alexander Mordvintsev — znah.net: https://znah.net/

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Source: https://aifilmhistory.org/entry/deepdream
Era: 2015-2021 · Before the Dawn
Last updated: 2026-09-12