Artificial Intelligence Can Now Create Faces Never Before Seen

When you're an A.I. researcher at Google, even your days off are filled with neural nets. Mike Tyka is a Google scientist who recently helped create the company's DeepDream venture, but this week he posted details of a personal project that could someday make DeepDream seem primitive. That famous program works by basically blending together elements of other pictures, and then modifying that collage, but Tyka's new approach takes the much more difficult and potentially rewarding path: teaching an A.I. to create all-new portraits from scratch. "I don't mind if the results are not necessarily realistic but fine texture is important no matter what even if it's surreal but [high-resolution] texture," Tyka commented Tuesday on his blog. The approach uses "generative adversarial networks" (GANs) to refine the A.I.'s abilities over time.