James Pero

Tech

You can't unsee this AI morphing Anime characters into real people

That's it, AI has officially gone too far.

Artificial intelligence has done, and continues to do, a lot of jarring stuff, but thankfully your anime is 100 percent, totally saf—

South China Morning Post/South China Morning Post/Getty Images

Just kidding, here are two YuYu Hakusho characters getting AI-morphed into real people.

Thanks to a website called Artbreeder, which was recently highlighted by both Kotaku and a YouTuber who goes by the name of AImikan, we’ve stared into the unthinkably real faces of some of our favorite anime characters and we can never go back.

To create these realistic images, AImikan fed Artbreeder’s AI software actual pictures of anime characters. The AI then makes a composite and spits out its own version, the parameters of which (like age or facial expression) can then be tweaked.

Just how much tweaking goes into each character varies according to AImikan — some characters only need a 30-minute adjustment while others can take hours.

Though the quality of the result varies, the fact that Artbreeder is able to render 2D anime characters into 3D at all is still pretty noteworthy, if a little strange to behold. If you want to see more of what Artbreeder can do, check out AImikan’s channel or mess around with composites yourself here.

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