Google AI gives YouTube selfie videos a wacky background, but you can't use it (yet)

Google's AI software can detect the subject of a video and change the background. Google's artificial intelligence researchers have a new trick up their sleeves: giving selfie videos a new background the way you can with still photos today. Switching out background scenery is a decades-old technology, but it's generally complicated and time-consuming -- think of making movies with superheros acting in front of green screens so computers can later replace the uniform green color with digital effects like exploding buildings. Having 3D scene data, for example extracted from newer iPhones' twin cameras, makes the process only a little easier. Google, though, trained a neural network with lots of carefully labeled imagery that helped it learn how to distinguish facial features -- eyes, hair, glasses, mouths and so on -- from everything else.