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No, its not over yet: the ability of AI tools to manipulate images continues to grow. The latest example is only a research paper for now, but a very impressive one, letting users simply drag elements of a picture to change their appearance.

This doesnt sound too exciting on the face of it, but take a look at the examples below to get an idea of what this system can do.

Not only can you change the dimensions of a car or manipulate a smile into a frown with a simple click and drag, but you can rotate a pictures subject as if it were a 3D model changing the direction someone is facing, for example. One demo even shows the user adjusting the reflections on a lake and height of a mountain range with a few clicks.

Heres an overview on various subjects:

Heres a closer look at landscape manipulation:

And just for fun, messing about with lions:

These videos come from the research teams homepage, though this has been crashing due to the amount of traffic sent to the site by Twitter (mainly by user @_akhaliq, who does a fantastic job highlighting interesting AI papers and is well worth a follow if that interests you). You can also read the research paper on arXiv right here.

As the team responsible note, whats really interesting about this work is not necessarily the image-manipulation per se, but the user interface. Weve been able to use AI tools like GANs to generate realistic images for a while now, but most methods lack flexibility and precision. You can tell an AI image generator to make a picture of a lion stalking through the savannah, and youll get one, but it might not be the exact pose you want or need.

This model, named DragGAN, offers a clear solution to this. The interface is exactly the same as traditional image-warping, but rather than simply smudging and mushing existing pixels, the model generates the subject anew. As the researchers write: [O]ur approach can hallucinate occluded content, like the teeth inside a lions mouth, and can deform following the objects rigidity, like the bending of a horse leg.

Obviously this is just a demo for now, and its impossible to evaluate the tech completely. (How realistic are the end images, for example? Its hard to say based on the low res videos available.) But its another example of making image manipulation more accessible.

The rest is here:

New AI research lets you click and drag images to manipulate them ... - The Verge