Microsoft Research created a bot that can draw anything you want

Microsoft Research is at it again. Microsoft Research has created a bot that will draw anything you want. While the thought of a bot drawing anything you want sounds great for those that have trouble drawing stick figures, it can be harder to teach AI to do something that comes naturally for some humans.

Microsoft Research describes the new bot technology as such:

“The new artificial intelligence technology under development in Microsoft’s research labs is programmed to pay close attention to individual words when generating images from caption-like text descriptions. This deliberate focus produced a nearly three-fold boost in image quality compared to the previous state-of-the-art technique for text-to-image generation, according to results on an industry standard test reported in a research paper posted on arXiv.org.

The technology, which the researchers simply call the drawing bot, can generate images of everything from ordinary pastoral scenes, such as grazing livestock, to the absurd, such as a floating double-decker bus. Each image contains details that are absent from the text descriptions, indicating that this artificial intelligence contains an artificial imagination.”

Usually, if you wanted to find an image, you would do a web search, but now there’s a bot that can create an image based on what you tell it to draw. This drawing bot uses some other bots to help it draw any requests you might have.

“The drawing bot closes a research circle around the intersection of computer vision and natural language processing that He and colleagues have explored for the past half-decade. They started with technology that automatically writes photo captions the CaptionBot.”

Microsoft Research details the more technical aspects of how the drawing bot works. However, it would be great to see what people come up with when describing images they want to the bot to draw.