NVIDIA's AI can fix bad photos by looking at other bad photos

A team of researchers from NVIDIA, MIT and Aalto University have found a way to fix pixelated photographs using AI -- even if the AI has never seen a clean example of the target photo. The group used deep learning -- a type of machine learning that can teach AI to piece together images, text or video -- to restore images with noisy input. While previous work trained AI to reconstruct photos with missing facial features by showing it complete photos, the current method means AI can rebuild a clean photo by only using "corrupted data", or two tarnished images. And surprisingly, its ability to clean up artifacts, remove text and beautify photos occasionally produced a better outcome than methods requiring cleaner reference material. The AI does this by utilizing a neural network that's been trained using corrupt photos.