How good is AI at generating new, unseen [visual] examples?

Question

By new, unseen examples; I mean like the animals in No Man's Sky.

A couple of images of the animals are:

So, upon playing this game, I was curious about how good is AI at generating visual characters or examples?

Answer 1

We are getting pretty good at image generation, some examples:

1. Radford, Alec, Luke Metz, and Soumith Chintala. "Unsupervised representation learning with deep convolutional generative adversarial networks." arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.06434 (2015). https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.06434.pdf

2. Gregor, Karol, Ivo Danihelka, Alex Graves, Danilo Jimenez Rezende, and Daan Wierstra. "DRAW: A recurrent neural network for image generation." arXiv preprint arXiv:1502.04623 (2015). https://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.04623.pdf

From (1):

Then there is another research direction around evolutionary algorithms, for example:

• Sims, Karl. "Evolving virtual creatures." In Proceedings of the 21st annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, pp. 15-22. ACM, 1994. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=6031059536657676358&hl=en&as_sdt=0,22 ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBt0imn77Zg