Finally, an app that turns your selfie into an anime character

There are countless uses for neural networks: one composes terrifying jazz, and another dreams up an entire text adventure game in real time. So it should come as no surprise that a smartphone app called TwinFACE, now available on the Google Play store, is designed to transform your selfie into an anime character. TwinFACE uses the same open-source UGATIT code as an AI developed earlier this year by a team of South Korean researchers from video game company NCSoft. But there's one catch: it doesn't do a very good job. The resulting portraits are, frankly, terrible and in some instances pretty scary.