Google used your pictionary sketches to teach its AI to draw

Google has been working on a wide range of AI-based projects lately – earlier this week, it showed off one that can identify what you're trying to draw and surface clean clipart that resembles your doodle. Its latest experiment is called Sketch-RNN, and it's a neural network system that has learned to draw on its own by looking at roughly 5.5 million sketches from people who played Pictionary with Google's AI-powered Quick, Draw! game from last year. We've teamed up with Product Hunt to offer you the chance to win an all expense paid trip to TNW Conference 2017! By triaging sketches in 75 different categories like cats, pigs and trucks, the AI can now draw basic representations of these things when presented with hand-drawn sketches. It's not merely copying what it's fed; instead, it's identifying what the input stands for and is trying to create a unique doodle based on what it knows about each object. For example, you could give Sketch-RNN a drawing of a cat's face with three eyes, and it'll spit out another version with two eyes – because it's been trained to understand that cats only have a pair of eyes.