Convolutional neural networks are good at recognizing disease symptoms in medical scans of patients who were injected with iodine-based dye, that makes their organs more visible. But some patients can’t take the dye. Now synthetic scans from a GAN are helping CNNs learn to analyze undyed images.

GANs are adept at mapping the artistic style of one picture onto the subject of another, known as style transfer. However, applied to the fanciful illustrations in children’s books, some GANs prove better at preserving style, others better at preserving subject matter.

Brilliant ideas strike at unlikely moments. Ian Goodfellow conceived generative adversarial networks while spitballing programming techniques with friends at a bar. Goodfellow, who views himself as “someone who works on the core technology, not the applications,”...

A strategy manifesto from one of China’s biggest tech companies declares, amid familiar visions of ubiquitous AI, that deepfakes are more boon than bane.

The same technology that has bedeviled Hollywood stars and roiled politics is easing corporate communications. Synthesia generates training and sales videos featuring photorealistic, synthetic talking heads that read personalized scripts in any of 34 languages.

In online retailing, the most common customer complaints are slow shipping and inability to try on clothes. Amazon conceived its Prime program to address the first concern. To answer the second, it built a virtual fitting room.

A new model designed to sharpen images tends to turn some dark faces white, igniting fresh furor over bias in machine learning. Photo Upsampling via Latent Space Exploration (Pulse) generates high-resolution versions of low-resolution images.

Generative adversarial networks don’t just produce pretty pictures. They can build world models, too. A GAN generated a fully functional replica of the classic video game Pac-Man.

AI’s ability to produce synthetic pictures that fool humans into believing they’re real has spurred a race to build neural networks that can tell the difference. Recent research achieved encouraging results.

Fashion models recently sashayed down Paris Fashion Week catwalks in outfits designed by deep neural nets. Swedish design firm Acne Studios based its 2020 fall/winter men’s line on output from a generative adversarial network.

While deep learning is taking us into the future, it’s also opening windows into the past. A Redditor brought 100-year-old silent film footage of New York City into the 21st century by automatically sharpening the picture, boosting the frame rate, and adding color.

Deepfake tech reared its digitally altered head in Indian politics, but with a twist: Altered images of a politician were produced by his own campaign.

Society awakened to the delight, threat, and sheer weirdness of realistic images and other media dreamed up by computers.

Amazon, watch your back. There’s a new player in the book business and, unlike Jeff Bezos, it doesn’t need eight hours of sleep a night. The online bookstore Booksby.ai is run entirely by AI. Neural networks write the books, create the cover art, price the merchandise, even write the reviews.

Generative networks can embroider sentences into stories and melodies into full-fledged arrangements. A new model does something similar with drawings.