---
title: "Amazing AI Automatically Turns You Into an Anime Character"
description: "A team of South Korean researchers created an AI that can ingest your selfies and spit out a picture-perfect rendition straight out of your favorite anime."
date: "2019-08-08"
modified: "2022-02-03"
authors:
  - name: "Victor Tangermann"
    job_title: "Senior Editor"
    link: "https://futurism.com/authors/victor"
url: "https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-anime-character"
categories:
  - "Artificial Intelligence"
tags:
  - "artificial intelligence"
  - "gan"
  - "gans"
  - "the digest"
---

# Amazing AI Automatically Turns You Into an Anime Character

![](<https://futurism.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/amazing-ai-automatically-turns-you-into-an-anime-character.jpg>)
*\<em\>Image: Kim et al.\</em\>*

## Anime AI

It was only a matter of time until somebody created an artificial intelligence designed to transmute you into an anime character.

And now a team of South Korean researchers from video game company NCSoft has done just that. They created a generative adversarial networks that will ingest your selfies and spit out a picture-perfect cartoon caricature straight out of your favorite anime.

https://youtu.be/Ko31fYGT20Y

Their new method, called "U-GAT-IT," bridges the substantial gap between a selfie photograph and a cartoon image by using a framework called "Adaptive Layer-Instance Normalization." The procedure is able to focus on important qualities of an image like eyes and ears without being distracted by other traits.

## U-GAT-IT

And that's a big step forward.

"Unlike previous attention-based methods which cannot handle the geometric changes between domains, our model can translate both images requiring holistic changes and images requiring large shape changes," reads the researchers' [ paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.10830>), which was submitted to preprint repository *arXiv* last month.

**READ MORE:** [South Korean Game Developer’s AI Turns Your Selfie Into an Anime Face](<https://medium.com/syncedreview/south-korean-game-developers-ai-turns-your-selfie-into-an-anime-face-4fa6df436bc6>) \[*Synced*\]

**More on GANs:** *[This AI Draws Horrifying New Pokémon](<https://futurism.com/the-byte/neural-network-pokemon>)*

## Author
I've been at Futurism since 2017, where my role has evolved to encompass design, writing, and increasingly editing. I've always been fascinated by space exploration and advanced transportation, which I've leaned into by interviewing luminaries in those fields while closely following the dimensions of policy and regulation that allow next-generation projects to succeed -- or, sometimes, to fail. I'm also keenly interested in the effects of generative AI on society, policies, and democratic institutions, as well as clean energy, physics and biology, and the vagaries of tech leadership. My work for Futurism has been cited by publications including Ars Technica, Gizmodo, PC Magazine, Jalopnik, Fox News, and the New York Post. I spent my childhood living in locations including Manila, the Philippines, and Geneva, Switzerland, attended McGill University, and now live in Toronto, Canada. Before Futurism I worked at AskMen and a small photography studio. In my free time, I'm an avid gardener, foodie, and craft beer lover, as well as a maker of artisanal hot pepper sauces. I have a magnificent dog named Freida.

### Author social links  
[Bluesky](<https://bsky.app/profile/vtanger.bsky.social>)