You’d think an emoji would be a clear and precise representation of an emotion. However the difference in rendering on different devices provides a great potential for miscommunication.

But even on the same platform, the kind of emotional reaction you may express is curated through the choice and design of available emojis. Take Facebook for example. The five Facebook emojis give you broad expressive capabilities, yet their design is very specific - and close to the extreme ends of the emotional scale. When using emojis, we wear these slightly too big masks of these particular, predefined facial expressions. We are becoming them.

I decided to reverse the process, to add body to the digital expression. That body should be, of course, that of Mark Zuckerberg.

Here are the results, created through disembodied neural networks.

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How it’s done:

First CNNMRF populated the emoticons with features of Marks face. It especially likes eyes and hair. I then used Deep-Image-Analogy to add more features, contrast, structure and adjust histogram. Finally jcjohnsons neural-style was used to upscale the image while adding texture.

Got a question? Just ask me.