This artist used machine learning to create realistic portraits of Roman emperors

Some people have spent their quarantine downtime baking sourdough bread. But others -- namely Toronto-based artist Daniel Voshart -- have created painstaking portraits of all 54 Roman emperors of the Principate period, which spanned from 27 BC to 285 AD. The portraits help people visualize what the Roman emperors would have looked like when they were alive. Included are Voshart's best artistic guesses of the faces of emperors Augustus, Nero, Caligula, Marcus Aurelius and Claudius, among others. They don't look particularly heroic or epic -- rather, they look like regular people, with craggy foreheads, receding hairlines and bags under their eyes. To make the portraits, Voshart used a design software called Artbreeder, which relies on a kind of artificial intelligence called generative adversarial networks (GANs).