The art of artificial intelligence: Microsoft bot draws what you describe, pixel by pixel

Want to order up a drawing? Say you want a picture of a bird with a yellow crown and black rings around its eyes. Researchers have enlisted artificial intelligence tools, including computer vision and natural language processing, to program a "drawing bot" that can create a picture from the ground up, based merely on a descriptive caption. "If you go to Bing and you search for a bird, you get a bird picture. But here, the pictures are created by the computer, pixel by pixel, from scratch," Microsoft researcher Xiaodong He said in a report on the project.