Do You Always Blink When a Picture Is Taken? Facebook Wants to Fix Those Photos.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. It's a common curse: The flash goes off, and you blink, resulting in an image that makes you look ridiculous. But Facebook thinks it doesn't have to be that way. Researchers there have created an artificial intelligence system that can retouch images of people blinking to replace closed eyes with convincing computer-generated open eyes. The tool uses a generative adversarial network, or GAN, which is a two-part machine learning system whose dual components compete against each other to try to fool the system into thinking its computer-generated images are real.