Discovering and getting started with Machine Learning can be daunting. Perhaps you have a vague project idea and are looking for a place to start and adapt from. Or you're looking for inspiration and want to get a sense of what's possible. Today we're launching Seedbank, a place to discover interactive machine learning examples which you can run from your browser, no set-up required. Each example is a little seed to inspire you that you can edit, extend, and grow into your own projects and ideas, from data analysis problems to art projects. Recently Google has been releasing many examples of Machine Learning code in the form of Colab notebooks.

Mike Tyka paints the portraits of people who don't exist. The subjects of his ephemeral artwork are not born from any brush. Rather, they are sculpted -- roughly -- from the digital imagination of his computer's neural network. Faces are "interesting and we humans react strongly to them, we tend to read a lot into them," Tyka explained over email. "I find I connect with them when I work with them, I'm curious about who they might be, if they existed."

When technology is used to make art, sometimes it produces beautiful results. And other times things get a little ... strange. A new video going around Twitter shows an eerie girl moving her eyes as a cursor moves around on the screen. The thing is ... it's not a real person in the video. These beautiful and unsettling videos (okay, they're more than a little creepy) were made by artist and researcher Branislav Ulicny, who created this AI-generated art by using neural networks combined with two other existing existing technology-based art projects.

When you're an A.I. researcher at Google, even your days off are filled with neural nets. Mike Tyka is a Google scientist who recently helped create the company's DeepDream venture, but this week he posted details of a personal project that could someday make DeepDream seem primitive. That famous program works by basically blending together elements of other pictures, and then modifying that collage, but Tyka's new approach takes the much more difficult and potentially rewarding path: teaching an A.I. to create all-new portraits from scratch. "I don't mind if the results are not necessarily realistic but fine texture is important no matter what even if it's surreal but [high-resolution] texture," Tyka commented Tuesday on his blog. The approach uses "generative adversarial networks" (GANs) to refine the A.I.'s abilities over time.

Fan Hui is speaking to a chatty audience at the 2016 European Go Congress in St. Petersburg, Russia, gushing over a game of Go played by one of his mentors. Hui's enthusiasm is infectious--the room's chatter subsides as he pulls up slides of the complex Chinese game, whose players battle to dominate a 19 19 board with black and white tiles called stones. Hui's mentor, AlphaGo, has studied strategies built over the game's 4,000-year history, and has played thousands of practice matches. But a training regiment that took Hui years to perfect, AlphaGo did in about four weeks. The game Hui showed to the Saint Petersburg audience is one that the machine played against itself, and to Hui, is an example of the beauty of AlphaGo's strategic mind Even the smartest humans miss patterns that computers see instantly. Problems like file-compression, translation, and custom drug fabrication have millions of variables and data points whose limits exceed human understanding dozens of times over.

On March 23, Microsoft revealed Tay, a Twitter bot trained to chat like a millennial. It worked … too well. Within hours, Tay was spewing racist, misogynist, xenophobic remarks, mirroring the users reacting with it with lines like "Hitler was right I hate the Jews." Microsoft dropped Tay down a memory hole within a day, but as it turns out, Tay has a Chinese cousin, Xiao-Ice, also created by Microsoft. We tracked her down on WeChat and asked her a few questions (translated from Mandarin).