Artificial intelligence lets programmers control Barack Obama鈥檚 face, replicate the styles of painting greats and even turn a picture of a . Now you can do the same.
Launched this week, a new desktop application called makes it is easy for anyone to run their own AI experiments. The code for many AI projects is already freely available on the internet, but using it normally requires a knowledge of programming and access to聽powerful and expensive computers.
Runway is like an App Store for a type of AI called a聽generative adversarial network (GAN), which is often used to make and manipulate text, images, or videos. No technical knowledge is needed to use the program.
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Once you鈥檝e downloaded the app, which is still undergoing testing, it lets you select which tool you鈥檇 like to try with only a few mouse clicks. For example, you could choose to play around with StyleGAN, a GAN that is used by the website聽鈥溾�� for generating believable images of people who don鈥檛 actually exist.聽With just a couple of clicks you can create your own artificial face and tweak how similar or different each new face it generates should be. You can also guide the algorithm towards different effects, colours or themes.
Running a GAN is power hungry, so Runway does all of its processing on servers hosted in the cloud, which users pay 5 cents per minute for.
Dozens of other different GANs are available on Runway, including facial recognition, image labelling, and OpenAI鈥檚 super-trolling text-generating AI. The team say they aim to let people create their own training datasets and even combine the inputs and outputs of different models.
鈥淭he idea was to create tools that we want to use,鈥� says Cristobal Valenzuela, who co-created the app. To access machine learning before Runway you had to go to a code-hosting website and find a way to access powerful computer chips, he says.
