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You’ll Never Sleep Again when you see These Ghastly Creations

Patrick Devaney

Patrick Devaney

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Oh the wonders of AI. Artificial Intelligence is driving us forward at breakneck speed. Self-driving cars, virtual assistants, curing diseases and even beating the world’s best poker players. It is predicted that AI will enable robots to do all jobs better than humans by the year 2045. Now that might not sound that far away but some present iterations of AI are great bell-weather for showing just how far AI has got to go.

Step forward Pix2Pix, a rather strange AI experiment from Dutch broadcaster NPO. The images Pix2Pix creates are quite disturbing but also rather fun. All you do is draw a face and then it will try and turn your basic drawing into a realistic picture. It’ll always try to draw a face but the results get interesting if you draw other things, like football insignia. It is also worth trying out different perspectives on the faces you’re drawing to see the effects it has on the outcome.

You’ll never sleep again when you see these ghastly creations
Made a meal of the face I doodled all over my school books back in the day
You’ll never sleep again when you see these ghastly creations
Doesn’t quite get the Mighty Everton badge. Looks more like a chubby koppite!
You’ll never sleep again when you see these ghastly creations
I had the most success when trying to draw a side on profile. Still pretty terrible though, but I suspect that could be my fault

In a testament, however, to how quickly AI can possibly move forward, Pix2Pix was only trained using the photos of just one person. It would be really interesting to see how quickly the pictures would improve as the AI learns from other people’s photos.

Anyway, maybe we’ll be able to come back to it in a few months and see if it is creating more realistic images maybe we won’t. Give it a go and see what you can come up with. If you can a make realistic looking picture of yourself we’d love to see it.

Patrick Devaney

Patrick Devaney

Patrick Devaney is a news reporter for Softonic, keeping readers up to date on everything affecting their favorite apps and programs. His beat includes social media apps and sites like Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, and Snapchat. Patrick also covers antivirus and security issues, web browsers, the full Google suite of apps and programs, and operating systems like Windows, iOS, and Android.

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