A Twitch Engineer Used Machine Learning to Generate Surreal Emoji

Twitch software engineer Avery Gnolek recently proved as much in an experiment featured on the streaming platform’s blog. Gnolek used a form of machine learning to create realistic-looking sets of the types of custom icons popular among Twitch users, including batches of fake human faces and cartoon avatars.

While the end result isn’t going to replace the work of human designers anytime soon, the project is one of a growing number of ways that artists, agencies and brands are testing machine learning breakthroughs that have unlocked new creative potential for the technology.

“Although this specific personal project was more to investigate the viability of the technology and produce some interesting images, the information I learned about the strengths of convolution neural networks does seem applicable for potential upcoming projects,” Gnolek told...