How an A.I. 'Cat-and-Mouse Game' Generates Believable Fake Photos

The woman in the photo seems familiar. She looks like Jennifer Aniston, the "Friends" actress, or Selena Gomez, the child star turned pop singer. She appears to be a celebrity, one of the beautiful people photographed outside a movie premiere or an awards show. She was created by a machine. The image is one of the faux celebrity photos generated by software under development at Nvidia, the big-name computer chip maker that is investing heavily in research involving artificial intelligence. At a lab in Finland, a small team of Nvidia researchers recently built a system that can analyze thousands of (real) celebrity snapshots, recognize common patterns, and create new images that look much the same -- but are still a little different.