While the field of AI-generated imagery is still relatively new and often thrilling (or terrifying), much of what's coming out of research labs now is incremental improvements on already-existing technology. It feels like every week some institution puts out a new, slightly improved algorithm or pushes a whitepaper to arXiv and it's another dancing skeleton or Mona Lisa moving her lips all weird. And then, sometimes, you get something that machine learning engineers and fans of the Animorphs books can all get excited about. That's what educator and AI researcher Xander Steenbrugge has done, with a series of AI models that morph humans into animals and back again. Like many image style transfer creations, this one was made using generative adversarial networks, or GANs, which "learn" from a training dataset and then try to turn a target image into the source you feed it.

While the field of AI-generated imagery is still relatively new and often thrilling (or terrifying), much of what's coming out of research labs now is incremental improvements on already-existing technology. It feels like every week some institution puts out a new, slightly improved algorithm or pushes a whitepaper to arXiv and it's another dancing skeleton or Mona Lisa moving her lips all weird. And then, sometimes, you get something that machine learning engineers and fans of the Animorphs books can all get excited about. That's what educator and AI researcher Xander Steenbrugge has done, with a series of AI models that morph humans into animals and back again. Like many image style transfer creations, this one was made using generative adversarial networks, or GANs, which "learn" from a training dataset and then try to turn a target image into the source you feed it.