pixel-me.tokyo: GAN for 8-bit portraits

Pixel-me at graduation.

Japanese developer Sato released pixel-me.tokyo, a website that generates an 8-bit style portrait based on user-submitted photos. It works both on human faces and pets. Sato also previously made AI Gahaku (“AI master painter”), which creates portraits in the style of classical painters. He built both projects using pix2pix, a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) that’s commonly used for AI art projects. Google developer advocate Kaz Sato (“similar names, but we are not the same person”) wrote up a nice piece for the Google Cloud blog about Sato’s process the projects.