Next Up in Fiber Nation: "I'm Sorry, Dave. I Can't Knit That."

A few weeks ago, a colleague and I reviewed a series of computer-generated knitting patterns. The results were intriguing, bizarre, and hilarious. The latest episode of Fiber Nation is all about artificial intelligence—AI.

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What happens when you try to teach a computer how to knit? Can a neural network match the creativity of a human? And what might happen if The Terminator became a knitwear designer?

Meet the AI that created knitting patterns.

Our guest is Janelle Shane, who does all kinds of pop-culture experiments with AI at her blog, aiweirdness.com. Her AI program has generated paint names, recipes, and Halloween costumes. Knitting patterns, though? Hoo boy. That was a new frontier.

Janelle Shane and her book. I’ve never laughed so hard reading about computers. Honest.

The idea behind AI is that you load a program with a ton of stuff—images, text, whatever—then give it a goal, like “find all the sheep in the photos” or “find the grammatical errors.” The AI looks at all that stuff, engages its mighty AI brain, and . . . makes a wild guess. It then checks that guess against the data it has, and over time fine-tunes itself to get better and better as guessing. We use AI all the time for things like Google Translate and image recognition programs. However, if you’ve ever looked at an automatic transcription, you realize that AI doesn’t always guess correctly. (We recreate an epic example of this right from the Fiber Nation archives; be sure you tune in to listen!)

AI Meets Knitting

Janelle had the help of a group of knitters from Ravelry, who christened her project “SkyKnit.”

“Make Caows and Shapcho.” No, that’s not a spelling error. And we have no idea what this is. Photo by MeganAnn.

They sent her a gazillion sample patterns and then spent many, many hours knitting, debugging, and reknitting the new ones that SkyKnit generated. Initial attempts led to strange but beautiful things like “Make Caows & Shapcho.”

It’s one thing to try to come up with simple word combinations for paint names; knitting patterns are a whole different ball of yarn. Take a look at the SkyKnit-generated instructions above. They sort of look normal, though “Rows 3, 4, 6, 3, 4, 4 times” might make the knitter a little suspicious. And that’s before you get to Row 8, where it tells you to knit 6395 stitches. Many of the patterns defied the laws of physics. And then there were the names. SkyKnit gets 10 points for creativity but 0 for coherence with pattern names like “Diagonal Loing for Thinglis,” “Blätman!*,” or “Butnet Scarf.”

If you squint, they look like lace. Kinda. “Snowing Leaves” and “Square Main of Grass” patterns. Photo: Molly Stevenson.

We talk about the project in much more detail in the episode, and you’ll hear what happens when Janelle sends us a stack of hat patterns she created just for us.

Links for this Episode

The blog that started it all: https://www.aiweirdness.com/

All About SkyKnit

Source of swatch pattern samples: https://stitch-maps.com/ (VERY cool site and concept.)

Downloadable AI Knitting Pattern Collection! (Warning: not for the faint of heart)

Be sure to check out the latest episode of Fiber Nation, Home Economics vs. Hitler: Sewing in WWII! You can listen on the player above, or wherever you prefer to get your podcasts. Don’t forget to subscribe via your favorite podcast app so you never miss an episode!

Thanks for listening,
Allison