Cars that will never work

These images were generated by an AI algorithm called BigGan, developed by researchers at DeepMind, the Alphabet-owned AI company. It is a type of machine learning approach that uses systems known as Generative Adversarial Networks, or Gans.

These are algorithms that work in opposition to each other – one trained to produce images of objects and another that looks at what it has produced to spot the differences between the AI-generated pictures and those of real life objects. This network feeds back on itself, continually improving.

“Over time, the model learns what these features are and how these features are composed,” says Andrew Brock, a computer scientist at Heriot-Watt University who helped to develop BigGan during a placement with DeepMind.

But as we can see here, while it recognises that cars and school buses should have wheels and certain shapes of bodywork, it doesn’t quite understand how they fit together.