Meta is turning children’s drawings into moving cartoons. (source: Meta blog)

FB/Meta Offers Downloadable Magic to Children by Animating Their Drawings

After a couple of years of getting roughed up in front of Congress for various reasons, FaceBook, now known as Meta, has decided to stay the course for the most part. And they want to be much friendlier and approachable. After the last whistleblower came forward and testified in Congress and to the English Parliament, FaceBook knew it had to do something.

If you go to about.fb.com, you will learn a lot about the new and improved Mark Zuckerburg social media juggernaut. Everything from Data and Privacy policy to fighting misinformation, Meta has listed several pages you can read up on. Always looking to improve the revenue of Meta and counter some of its recent bad press, its executives have turned to cartoons.

Meta says it can take a child’s cartoon and make it come to life. The company is promoting it this way:

“Our researchers have developed the first-of-its-kind method for using AI to automatically animate children’s hand-drawn figures of people and humanlike characters (i.e., a character with two arms, two legs, a head, etc.). By uploading drawings to our prototype system, parents and children can watch their drawings become moving characters that dance, skip and jump. And, they can even download a video of their animated drawings to share with friends and family. Parents can also opt in to have their child’s drawing used to continue to teach the AI model.”

And with more time being spent at home in front of a screen, this might be a great distraction for children and parents alike.

The description that’s given on how the AI works says it reverse-engineers the picture a child has drawn. First the joints, the legs, arms, etc. Meta says it reached its goal of building an AI system that can identify and automatically animate the humanlike figures in children’s drawings with a high success rate and without any human guidance.

Meta includes a link to its AI Blog, showing videos that illustrate the process of bringing the crayon-created and imagination-driven picture of a child to life.

While Meta is the new corporate name of the company, it will always be FaceBook to many users. That company may be a lot of things but it is certainly never boring.

read more at fb.com