A bot created its own set of Pokémon, and the results are amazing

Sure Salvador Dalí’s surrealist works are great and all, but have you seen these AI-generated Pokémon yet? They belong in a museum!

They’re the work of Max Woolf, a data scientist at BuzzFeed and self-described “creator of AI content generation tools.” He recently created an entirely new series of Pokémon by feeding a bot images of every Pokémon currently in existence. As he pointed out on Twitter, this is not a joke.

We want more— After the first iteration of the experiment, Twitter users clamored for more, which led to Woolf implementing an interesting series of constraints. The first was a model that only looked at first-generation Pokémon.

The next experiment involved a fine-tuned AI that got only one image of Pikachu — the results of which are both frightening and cool.

When looked at from a distance, the majority — if not all — of these new Pokémon would fit seamlessly into some generation of one of the most beloved franchises of all time. However, upon closer inspection, some of these creatures look like factory rejects:

Do it yourself— Any programming experts who would like to try their hand at emulating this project can access the image preprocessing code used in the new Pokémon generation through this GitHub link, which Woolf has made public.

Projects like this will hold us over until we can get our hands on Pokémon Arceus. Unless you happen to be in Christina Aguilera’s family, in which case you’ve been able to play the forthcoming RPG for a while now.