The AI based tool can create "cutouts" or segments of different parts of an image. This comes handy while editing photos or while analyzing imagery for biological or security purposes. These tasks have one thing in common: you need to be able to identify and separate different objects within an image. Traditionally, researchers have had to start from scratch each time they want to analyze a new part of an image. Meta aims to change this laborious process by being the one-stop-shop for researchers and web developers working on such problems.

Disney Research Studios explains that it trained FRAN on a database of hundreds of computer-generated synthetic faces. This allowed them to generate thousands of images of people with the same angle, facial expression and lighting conditions; a herculean task if it had to be done with real images. "Our new face re-ageing network (FRAN) incorporates simple and intuitive mechanisms that provide artists with localized control and creative freedom to direct and fine-tune the re-aging effect, a feature that is largely important in real production pipelines and often overlooked in related research work," said Disney Research Studios in a statement. In video examples provided by Disney, the neural network does a good job at ageing the faces of characters in a video, albeit with some artefacts. While it may seem like this algorithm could potentially replace many VFX jobs in the future, it is not likely that it will do so anytime soon.

Imagine being able to generate high-quality photos just be describing them to a computer. This sci-fi scenario is now a reality, thanks to Microsoft's new AI tool. Drawing Bot created the above image simply from the description of "a bird with a yellow body, black wings and a short beak," using a new technique where the AI pays close attention to individual words when generating images from caption-like text descriptions, resulting in a 3-fold boost in image quality compared to other text-to-image generation techniques. The bot can do more than just birds, being able to draw everything from ordinary pastoral scenes, such as grazing livestock, to the absurd, such as a floating double-decker bus. "If you go to Bing and you search for a bird, you get a bird picture. But here, the pictures are created by the computer, pixel by pixel, from scratch," said Xiaodong He, a principal researcher and research manager in the Deep Learning Technology Center at Microsoft's research lab in Redmond, Washington.