AI is making Street Fighter characters real, and it's a nightmare

One day, we’re going to look back on all the artificial intelligence systems we’ve created and despair. That day might be the one when our inevitable robot servants have a horrific uprising, or it might just be the day when you see an AI’s attempt to render Street Fighter’s Zangief as a real person based on a quick scan of his in-game appearance. If it is the latter, today’s the day, by the way.

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Twitter user Siberian_644 has crafted a wonderful, often nightmarish twitter thread of Street Fighter 5 characters rendered as photo-realistic people thanks to a Google AI algorithm. These sorts of filters are fairly common these days, from things like FaceApp to other neural network trained AIs that can turn people into cartoons or the reverse.

With Street Fighter 5, there’s some surprisingly decent results, like this attempt to render a real-life Chun-Li:

— Siberian_644 (@Siberian_644) August 30, 2021

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But there’s also incredible outcomes like that previously-mentioned attempt to recreate Zangief:

Ok. That's a wrap! (for today, ofc)
Let me introduce Zangief. 🤣🤣🤣
— Siberian_644 (@Siberian_644) August 30, 2021

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The iconic live-action version is of course an allegedly coked-up Jean-Claude Van Damme -- but this algorithm delivers a version that doesn’t look anything like the Muscles from Brussels:

Street Fighter V Characters photos doctored by Google algorithm. Thread. #StreetFighter
First one is Guile
— Siberian_644 (@Siberian_644) August 30, 2021

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SF5 newcomer Rashid, however, actually comes out pretty well like a real person who actually looks like their in-game counterpart:

Rashid
— Siberian_644 (@Siberian_644) August 30, 2021

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The way these renders work in a broad sense is that the features it has are lifted from a huge database of real-life photos which the AI has learned from. That’s why you sometimes might get a slightly uncanny feeling of vague familiarity from some of the characters; it might be picking up features of commonly-photographed celebrities, for instance.

Claw/Vega always boasts about his beauty - that’s why he wears a mask in battle, to protect his face. It’s fair to say that Google does his good looks more justice than SF5 itself:

Balrog (Vega)
— Siberian_644 (@Siberian_644) August 30, 2021

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Poor Ryu doesn’t fare so well:

Protagonist himself
— Siberian_644 (@Siberian_644) August 30, 2021

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Lucia, who is a relatively new transplant from the Final Fight games, has an algorithm photo that looks so eerily close to somebody I knew years ago that it’s seriously creeping me out.

Lucia #1
— Siberian_644 (@Siberian_644) August 30, 2021

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One thing the algorithm doesn’t seem to cope very well with at all is accessories - eyepatches become glasses, and Ibuki’s ninja face covering being mistaken for, er, seemingly an extreme five-o’clock shadow.