Meta develops AI that can animate children's figure drawings

Researchers at Meta 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.).

Parents can now upload drawings to Meta's prototype system and children can watch their drawings become moving characters that dance, skip and jump.

Parents 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, said Meta on its blog.

"Our goal was to build 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," said Meta in a message on their blog.

Meta hopes to get closer to developing AI that can undersatnd the world from a human point of view. "We invite you to test out the systems’ animation capabilities by uploading your children’s drawings to our prototype. In the coming year, we also hope to release the data set and share more details on our research."