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AI tool turns low-pixel faces into realistic images A photo editing tool designed by a programming team at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, raises prospects for sharper, cleaner images in digital presentations and also promises hours of fun for older-video game fans who can now generate crystal clear faces for low-pixel characters who populated early products. But the tool also unexpectedly brought to the surface concerns about bias in the use of datasets in massive machine learning projects. PULSE, Photo Upsampling via Latent Space Exploration, was created by Duke researchers to create more realistic images from low-pixel source data. In their research paper distributed earlier this year, the team explained how their approach differed from earlier efforts to generate lifelike images from 8-bit imagery. "Instead of starting with the low resolution image and slowly adding detail, PULSE traverses the high-resolution natural image manifold, searching for images that downscale to the original low resolution image," the report stated.