Been meaning to ask about this for a while, but recent comments in the software discussion reminded me.

The tl;dr summary... has anyone ever used neural networks to generate fantasy names, and if so, any tips/advice/how to's to share?

Slightly longer version...
I love the idea of neural networks, though my programming knowledge is extremely rudimentary. However I know just enough python to be dangerous...

I used textgenrnn from here...

https://github.com/minimaxir/textgenrnn

I used a dataset of Scottish place names from a government website, as I wanted to start with something I was fairly familiar with, just to see how it worked. In some ways, it worked almost too well, as I was getting actual place names even when I bumped the temperature up to over 1 (I think I ran 15 epochs to train it, maybe should have done less.)

Out of every 10 results, I'd get one or two actual place names, then maybe 2 - 4 that were usable (or usable if I substituted a letter or two). About half were pretty much garbage.

Anyone else tried this? Not going to lie, I had a massive amount of fun with it, and I'm going to be hunting down other datasets to try out. Just curious to know if anyone else has dabbled with this, and how it worked for you.