Google’s open-source machine learning project Tensorflow is probably used all the time for helpful things that advance the cause of mankind or something. But in my experience, what it has been best used for is making horrifying auto-generated images out of simple line drawings. I’m referring to edges2cats, which turned any line drawing into a cat. It was a whole thing! Everyone was trying it out, then posting pictures of really demented cats to Twitter for others to laugh at.
Today the same thing has happened, except it’s not cats. It’s human heads. And instead of Google’s project, Dutch Public Broadcaster NPO created its own artificial intelligence system that had only been fed thousands of images of one of its anchors, Lara Rense. As…