The GANfather: The man who's given machines the gift of imagination

One night in 2014, Ian Goodfellow went drinking to celebrate with a fellow doctoral student who had just graduated. At Les 3 Brasseurs (The Three Brewers), a favorite Montreal watering hole, some friends asked for his help with a thorny project they were working on: a computer that could create photos by itself. Researchers were already using neural networks, algorithms loosely modeled on the web of neurons in the human brain, as "generative" models to create plausible new data of their own. But the results were often not very good: images of a computer-generated face tended to be blurry or have errors like missing ears. The plan Goodfellow's friends were proposing was to use a complex statistical analysis of the elements that make up a photograph to help machines come up with images by themselves.