GANTA CLAUS

Turning famous faces into Santa using AI is wild, weird and wonderful.

Festive funsters creative.ai and Tiny Giant got together to serve up a super-sized Santa sack of seasonal AI kookiness.

Purists might label their Yuletide machine-learning frolics as a St. Nicholas-inspired, facial-aware, attribute-aware style transfer experiment using generative adversarial network (GAN) technology.

They prefer to call it Ganta Claus.

In a bid to turn the Christmas dial up to eleven, the team set out to discover how quickly they could train a neural network to give images of people a Santa makeover.

After a series of quickfire tests, they decided to use a selection of famous faces and let the AI work its magic.

It actually took three GANs to work together in the real Santa/Christmas Spirit, but we won’t bore you with the details. Although if that’s your thing, you can get in touch with the team. The GANimation below shows how it all happened.

By combining the output of the networks, the AI generated dozens of new Santa images to turn each celebrity into their festive doppelganger.

“Think of the Santa images as the love children of the two GANs. What excites me is that we’ve shown it’s possible to create interesting visual outputs at speed with a relatively small training set. This opens the door to many possibilities.”

— Roelof Pieters, CEO and Founder of creative.ai

“This is our Christmas gift to the world. Our ambition was to use AI to turn everyone into Santa. What we’ve learnt from this collaboration is with a little more time we can do just that.”

— Richard Norton, co-founder of Tiny Giant

With a sleigh’s worth of shiny ideas waiting to be unwrapped, the team are promising lots more AI wow and weirdness throughout 2019.

Merry Christmas everyone!