The term homunculus (Latin for “little man”) refers to an artificially created human being – and stands for mankind’s dream of being able to construct a being according to its own imagination and with the help of the latest technology. In literature, this idea has already been processed in many ways, for example in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Today, we are closer to this dream than ever before, but in the age of deep learning, it is neither alchemists nor scientists, but programmers who teach artificial intelligence to generate human-like faces independently and deceptively realistically. Ingenious, scary or dangerous?
