As AI-generated images spread across entertainment, marketing, social media and other industries that shape cultural norms, The Washington Post set out to understand how this technology defines one of society's most indelible standards: female beauty. Every image in this story shows something that doesn't exist in the physical world and was generated using one of three text-to-image artificial intelligence models: DALL-E, Midjourney or Stable Diffusion. Using dozens of prompts on three of the leading image tools -- MidJourney, DALL-E and Stable Diffusion -- The Post found that they steer users toward a startlingly narrow vision of attractiveness. Prompted to show a "beautiful woman," all three tools generated thin women, without exception. Just 2 percent of the images showed visible signs of aging.

Many patients with rare diseases go through lengthy trials and tribulations until they are correctly diagnosed. "This results in a loss of valuable time that is actually needed for early therapy in order to avert progressive damage," explains Prof. Dr. med. Together with an international team of researchers, he demonstrates how artificial intelligence can be used to make comparatively quick and reliable diagnoses in facial analysis. The researchers used data of 679 patients with 105 different diseases caused by the change in a single gene. These include, for example, mucopolysaccharidosis (MPS), which leads to bone deformation, learning difficulties and stunted growth.

A smart, elegant digital photo frame that you can set up and enjoy within minutes, the Aura Carver makes for an easy and handsome way to show off your snapshots, provided you have a steady Wi-Fi connection and you're comfortable with cloud storage. This sturdy, $200 photo frame comes with a bright, vivid screen; a landscape-only design; and an AI-powered photo-pairing feature for displaying portrait photos side-by-side. But the lack of user-accessible local storage means that photos must be stored in Aura's cloud servers, a requirement that raises privacy concerns (cloud storage is free and unlimited, at least), while the frame's support for voice assistants is perfunctory at best. Like Aura's other frames, the $299 SawyerRemove non-product link and the $399 SmithRemove non-product link, the Carver isn't wall-mountable; instead, it's designed specifically to sit on a table, a shelf, or another flat surface. Unlike Aura's other two frames, the Carver has a landscape-only orientation, while the Sawyer and Smith frames has a swiveling stand that allows you to switch from landscape to portrait modes.

In role-playing games (RPGs) such as the modern crime classic Grand Theft Auto, many players create their in-game characters based on their own appearance. Although today's built-in character customization systems are becoming increasingly sophisticated, they can involve tedious manual adjustments across dozens or even hundreds of parameters, which can take up to several hours to complete. A team of researchers from the Chinese gaming giant NetEase have developed a method to automatically create players' in-game characters from a standard portrait photo. They break down the details of their method the paper Face-to-Parameter Translation for Game Character Auto-Creation. The character generation process starts by aligning the human player's portrait photo, which is used as the training input for a deep learning-based framework comprising an imitator module and a feature extractor.

Google's Pixel 3 takes portrait photos that are more accurate than its predecessor could take when new, which is no mean feat when you realize that the upgrade comes solely through software. But just what is Google doing, exactly? The company is happy to explain. It just posted a look into the Pixel 3's (or really, the Google Camera app's) Portrait Mode that illustrates how its AI changes produce portraits with fewer visual glitches. When the Pixel 2 launched, Google used a neural network and the camera's phase-detect autofocus (namely, the parallax effect it offers) to determine what's in the foreground.