Generate cute anime girls with AI in seconds

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You can now generate cute anime girls like what I did with this website enabled by AI (artificial intelligence).

Details like hair color, hair style, eye color are tweakable. And most importantly, you can provide a "noise" image to make the result completely your own.

It's possible to customize the result with "noise" option. /make.girls.moe Screenshot

The website was put online on August 14 by a Chinese student at Shanghai's Fudan University.

The student, who identified himself as Jin Yanghua, has decided to make the whole project open-source on Github.

The generated pictures are not very large, but most of them look good, with some pictures seeming a bit distorted.

Generated images that look distorted. /make.girls.moe Screenshot

Jin said he made all this happen with reinforced machine learning.

His code was based on a neural network framework called "Chainer". But Jin modified the framework to suit his own need.

Many people are actively sharing their creations on Twitter, most of them Chinese and Japanese, who were amazed by the program's fast performance.

"It's the ultimate tool to generate unique avatars!" said @nekotorion on Twitter.

@nekotorion's tweet. /Twitter Screenshot‍

Click here to try generating one by yourself at make.girls.moe

AI heat brings more people in

The existence of this website shows that the AI industry is no longer simply the big companies' gamble for future, it is an interesting game everyone can play.

More and more AI tools are being developed, some of which are very easy to utilize, making it possible for non-professionals to join the game.

In China, big companies like search engine Baidu and gaming giant Tencent are trying to build easy-to-use AI frameworks, in a hope to attract more developers working on their platform.

Baidu's founder Robin Li claims "Baidu is an AI company" at Baidu Union Summit 2017. /Xinhua Photo

There's currently no leading company in China's AI circle, so the platform war can be very fierce.

Moe culture in China

Another reason for this picture-generation site to go viral is the moe culture.

In the Japanese animation world, "moe" is the word for "cute". Anime lovers nowadays use this word every day to show their love to people and things.

Chinese anime fans also find this word interesting and use it often. So the moe culture basically means things related to anime, manga and other "2-dimensional" art forms.

Fans of manga, anime and video game flood into ChinaJoy 2017 event in Shanghai on July 27, 2017. /Xinhua Photo

People fond of moe culture in China are usually in their 20s or even younger. The boys and girls are well known for spending more money on things they love.

For example, they wish to travel for anime events more often than other people.

According to a recent report by Chinese travel service mafengwo.cn, 42 percent of people under the age of 27 are OK to travel to places where animes and movies are made.

This can be a potentially big market opportunity for the travel business.