This Microsoft bot can sketch an image from caption-like descriptions

Microsoft is developing a bot that can draw what you want it to by leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology -- programmed to pay close attention to individual words when generating images from caption-like text descriptions.

The technology, which the researchers simply call the drawing bot, can generate images of everything from ordinary pastoral scenes -- such as grazing livestock -- to the absurd and a floating double-decker bus.

Each image contains details that are absent from the text descriptions, indicating that this AI contains an artificial imagination.

"If you go to Bing and you search for a bird, you get a bird picture. But here, the pictures are created by the computer, pixel by pixel, from scratch. These birds may not exist in the real world -- they are just an aspect of our computer's imagination of birds," Xiaodong He from Microsoft's research lab in a blog post late on Thursday.

According to results on an industry standard test, reported in a research paper posted on arXiv.org, the bot produced a nearly three-fold boost in image quality compared to the previous state-of-the-art technique for text-to-image generation.

The core of this bot is a technology known as a "Generative Adversarial Network" or GAN.

The network consists of two Machine Learning models -- one that generates images from text descriptions and another, known as a discriminator, that uses text descriptions to judge the authenticity of generated images.

The researchers said that text-to-image generation technology could find practical applications acting as a sort of sketch assistant to painters and interior designers or as a tool for voice-activated photo refinement.

For now, the technology is imperfect.

"For AI and humans to live in the same world, they have to have a way to interact with each other. The language and vision are the two most important modalities for humans and machines to interact with each other," The blog post explained.