Scientists have trained an artificial neural network to create images of human faces on demand.

According to New Scientist, Alec Radford from Indico and Facebook's AI research lab in New York have performed experiments with a generative adversarial network. One part of the system creates fake data which tries to fool the other part into using it as actual training data.


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The team gave the network images of smiling women, and told it to subtract pictures of women with neutral expressions from the network and add in pictures of men with neutral expressions. The aim was to make the network take the concept of "smiling" and add it to the concept of "man." The network gave out results of smiling men.

New Scientist says that although the current images are only 32 by 32 pixels, it could be potentially scaled up into a system where you input a description and the network would give you an entirely made up image.

In other neural network news, Google recently launched a feature that answers your emails for you.