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Artificial Intelligence Can Now Design Cars And They Look Eerie

The days when car designers relied on pen and paper to give us our favorite shapes are long gone. And while computers are currently an automotive designer's best friend, they can also handle the entire process on their own. You see, the car images we have here have been created by artificial intelligence and sit in front of you without any human touches.
AI-designed cars 6 photos
Photo: NVIDIA
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These designs are the result of an NVIDIA experiment that uses machine learning to mix and match the style of real images. A generative adversarial network (GAN) uses a process defined as style transfer to combine the characteristics of various designs.

As you'll get to see in the video below, the software can work on the important bits, as well as on the fine details and there are three layers of refinement when combining the source image with the others.

The tech company released a paper on the matter, which you can find in the attached PDF, with this describing the endeavor. The company's researchers trained AI for one week, relying on eight Tesla V100 GPUs.

NVIDIA introduced the idea of GAN in a paper published back in 2014, but the human faces rendered back then (more on this below) were nothing like the realistic images we have now.

If we zoom in on these contraptions, some of the cars seem to have "please kill me" written all over them, while others appear to be legit. It looks like Asian designs are the best, while we also found a few American cars that were properly represented. German toys? Not so much, since the Porsche and the Beetle we have here look like they sat under the sun for way too long.

Oh, and if you think the cars look odd, you should see the people. Unsurprisingly, the software's most accomplished creation seems to be a set of human portraits, the kind you and I could have serious trouble marking as fake.

We've added an image of the portraits to the gallery above and if you've made it this far without getting dizzy, you should probably be OK with the cats and the home interiors the AI has come up with.

The bottom line is that we have to prepare ourselves for the risks and challenges associated with this kind of technology. New areas of interest related to this will undoubtedly develop in the future, as we'll all have to learn to tell the real images and videos apart from the faux ones.

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About the author: Andrei Tutu
Andrei Tutu profile photo

In his quest to bring you the most impressive automotive creations, Andrei relies on learning as a superpower. There's quite a bit of room in the garage that is this aficionado's heart, so factory-condition classics and widebody contraptions with turbos poking through the hood can peacefully coexist.
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