The basics of Convolutional Neural Networks

CNNs in general, and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in particular, have been in the news lately. A GAN is a class of CNN developed by Ian Goodfellow and his colleagues initially in 2014. In GANs, two neural networks compete against each other in a game (in a game theory sense). Given a dataset, a GAN learns to create new data examples similar to the training set. For example, it might be a little slow but there is a website that will generate faces of people that don't exist.

We'll let your imagination run wild but it would certainly be possible to create a film using some of these generated "humans" to star in the movie. There is other research to try to solve the converse. Given an image, can we determine if it's a GAN-generated image or a real person? You can play around with the website here:

https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/

To use it, just keep on refreshing the page and it will generate...