The fashion industry is forever being accused of using models that have unrealistic standards of beauty -- but in the future, the models themselves could be unreal, too. All of the realistic-looking people in the video below are actually fakes -- dreamed up by a pair of AI developed by researchers from Kyoto University in Japan. The AI were first trained on real-life pictures of humans models. From this, one AI was tasked with repeatedly trying to dream up images of replica models that its counterpart could not distinguish form the real thing. This model-creating technology could one day be used to create fake models for use in advertisements and by the clothing and fashion industries.

For a while now I've been experimenting with ways to use generative neural nets to make portraits. Early experiments were based on deepdream-like approaches using backprop to the image but lately I've focused on GANs. As always resolution and fine detail is really difficult to achieve. For starters the receptive field of thse networks is usually less than 256x256 pixels. One way around this is tiling combined with stacking GANs, which many people have experimented with, for example this paper uses a two-stage GAN to get high resolution: (https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.03242). I tried a similar approach and I've been finally been having some more success upres-ing GAN-generated faces to 768x768 pixels in two stages and in some cases as far as 4k x 4k, using three stages.