Remember last year when Google released an AI-powered web tool that played Pictionary with your doodles? Well, surprise! Those doodles you drew have now been used to teach Google’s AI how to draw. The resulting program is called Sketch-RNN and, frankly, it draws about as well as a toddler. But like any new parents, Google’s AI scientists are proud as punch.

To create Sketch-RNN, Google Brain researchers David Ha and Douglas Eck collected more than half a million user-drawn sketches from the Google tool Quick, Draw! Each time a user drew something on the app, it recorded not only the final image, but also the order and direction of every pen stroke used to make it. The resulting data gives a more complete picture (ho, ho, ho) of how we…

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