One of NVIDIA’s many different artificial intelligence projects (and by far the best one to date) lets you envision what your pet might look like it it were a meerkat. Or a polar bear. Or a hyaena.
In case you didn’t know, NVIDIA has its own research group dedicated solely to research into AI, and that includes developing new AI systems and agents which can do some pretty neat things. As the researchers say, although they take AI research very seriously, there’s still no excuse not to have some fun with the products of their labors.
Enter GANimal. It’s the name given to an AI system they developed around a year ago which can generate a selection of images that are sorts of translations of your own pet’s face into what said pet might look like if they were other types of animals.
“With GANimal, you can bring your pet’s alter ego to life by projecting their expression and pose onto other animals,” explain the developers. “Once you input an image into the GANimal app, the image translation network unleashes your pet’s true self by projecting their unique characteristics onto everything from a lynx to a Saint Bernard.”
The tool works with the help of GANs - or generative adversarial networks - which are a kind of machine learning algorithm that generates authentic-looking samples (like photos) based on an existing dataset thereof. The products can end up looking convincingly similar to the original, sharing many (or sometimes seemingly all of its characteristics) despite still being specifically different from it.
