AI’s Latest Adventure Turns Pets into GANimals

Imagine your Labrador’s smile on a lion or your feline’s finicky smirk on a tiger. Such a leap is easy for humans to perform, with our memories full of images. But the same task has been a tough challenge for computers — until the GANimal. A team of NVIDIA researchers has defined new AI techniques that give computers enough smarts to see a picture of one animal and recreate its expression and pose on the face of any other creature. The work is powered in part by generative adversarial networks (GANs), an emerging AI technique that pits one neural network against another.