Feb 03, 2022
Meta AI (a division of the company formerly known as Facebook) has developed a tool to animate children’s drawings. The tool automatically animates children’s drawings of human-like figures. Provided the drawing is clear enough, the software can identify the figure, isolate it from the wider drawing, rig it, and make it dance about.
So What?
Apart from being a lot of fun, the achievement here is to have trained an AI to be able to recognise the key elements of a human-like figure within the abstract nature of a child's drawing. (To you it may obviously look like a representation of grandpa Fred, but to the rest of us it looks not unlike an amorphous blob, interspersed with giant misshapen limbs). Children depict people in a huge variety of ways, and Meta had to get their tool to recognise as many of these as possible.
The Meta AI team certainly sees more possibilities ahead:
“By teaching AI to work effectively with this quintessential human form of creativity, we hope this project will move us closer to building AI that can understand the world from a human point of view.
Someday, perhaps, an AI system could take a complex drawing and then instantly create a detailed animated cartoon using multiple fantastical characters interacting with one another and elements from the background. With AR glasses, those stories could even seem to come to life in the real world, dancing or talking with the child who drew it just moments earlier. The possibilities are as limitless as the human imagination.”