These faces show how far AI image generation has advanced in just four years

Developments in artificial intelligence move at a startling pace -- so much so that it's often difficult to keep track. But one area where progress is as plain as the nose on your AI-generated face is the use of neural networks to create fake images. In the image above you can see what four years of progress in AI image generation looks like. The crude black-and-white faces on the left are from 2014, published as part of a landmark paper that introduced the AI tool known as the generative adversarial network (GAN). The color faces on the right come from a paper published earlier this month, which uses the same basic method but is clearly a world apart in terms of image quality.