Developments in artificial intelligence move at a startling pace — so much so that it’s often difficult to keep track. But one area where progress is as plain as the nose on your AI-generated face is the use of neural networks to create fake images. In brief: we’re getting scarily good at it.
In the image above you can see what four years of progress in AI image generation looks like. The crude black-and-white faces on the left are from 2014, published as part of a landmark paper that introduced the AI tool known as the generative adversarial network (GAN). The color faces on the right come from a paper published earlier this month, which uses the same basic method but is clearly a world apart in terms of image quality.