Last month, you may have seen that a group of researchers created a machine learning system that could transform the presentation of Grand Theft Auto V into something that looks almost photorealistic. It turns out, at about the same time, another group of AI enthusiasts were working on something even more impressive involving Rockstar's open world title. On Friday, YouTuber Harrison Kinsley shared a video showing off GAN Theft Auto, a neural network that can generate a playable stretch of Grand Theft Auto V's game world on its own. Kinsley and collaborator Daniel Kukieła made GAN Theft Auto with GameGAN, which last year recreated Pac-Man by watching another AI play through the game. GameGAN, as the name suggests, is a generative adversarial network.

While automakers are still negotiating with local and state governments to let autonomous cars test drive on open streets, one programmer has found a more accessible proving ground to teach AI how to be a motorist: Grand Theft Auto V. It's not the first time folks have used the game to train their self-driving vehicles -- but you can watch this one learn in real-time on Twitch. Programmer Harrison'Sentdex' Kinsley created the AI (or "convolutional neural network"), named it Charles, and set it loose in the game to teach itself through deep learning. While that sounds advanced, so far Charles hasn't quite mastered avoiding collisions with cars, dividers, signs and people. If this AI hit the road today, it would have some real-life police after it quickly -- so long as it didn't hurl itself into the water first (a frequent fate on the livestream). As Kinsley describes in the Twitch description, Charles "learns and takes all actions based on single frames at a time, and bases his decisions on just pixel data. Charles only sees exactly what you see."