https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/23/nvidias-canvas-ai-painting-tool-instantly-turns-blobs-into-realistic-landscapes/

AI has been filling in the gaps for illustrators and photographers for years now — literally, it intelligently fills gaps with visual content. But the latest tools are aimed at letting an AI give artists a hand from the earliest, blank-canvas stages of a piece. Nvidia’s new Canvas tool lets the creator rough in a landscape like paint-by-numbers blobs, then fills it in with convincingly photorealistic (if not quite gallery-ready) content.

Each distinct color represents a different type of feature: mountains, water, grass, ruins, etc. When colors are blobbed onto the canvas, the crude sketch is passed to a generative adversarial network. GANs essentially pass content back and forth between a creator AI that tries to make (in this case) a realistic image and a detector AI that evaluates how realistic that image is. These work together to make what they think is a fairly realistic depiction of what’s been suggested.