The enigmatic, painted smile of the “Mona Lisa” is known around the world, but that famous face recently displayed a startling new range of expressions, courtesy of artificial intelligence (AI).
In a video shared to YouTube on May 21, three video clips show disconcerting examples of the Mona Lisa as she moves her lips and turns her head. She was created by a convolutional neural network — a type of AI that processes information much as a human brain does, to analyze and process images.
Researchers trained the algorithm to understand facial features’ general shapes and how they behave relative to each other, and then to apply that information to still images. The result was a realistic video sequence of new facial expressions from a single frame.