This Algorithm Taught Itself to Animate a Still Photo

A team of researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) have created a deep-learning algorithm that is able to generate its own videos and predict the future of a video based on a single frame. As detailed in a paper to be presented next week at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems in Barcelona, the CSAIL team trained their algorithm by having it watch 2 million videos which would last for over a year if played back to back. These videos consisted of banal moments in day to day life to better accustom the machine to normal human interactions. Importantly, these videos were found "in the wild," meaning they were unlabeled and thus didn't offer the algorithm any clues as to what was happening in the video. Drawing from this video data set, the algorithm would attempt to generate videos from scratch that mimicked human motion based on what it had observed in the 2 million videos.