I think the AI project I focus on is a simple one, for it is the production of an undergraduate medical student — Osamu Akiyama, rather than a professional expert. He focuses on the ASCII art. In his paper about this project, he explains ASCII art as a type of graphic art which presents pictures with printable characters (ASCII characters). And he also mentions that there is two major styles in ASCII art, the first one is tone-based, which represents the intensity distribution of the original images by using the density of the characters. (Like the image below)

The second one is structure-based, which represents line structures of the original images by using the direction of the lines in the characters. (Like the image below) And he argues that it is generally accepted that creating structure based ASCII art is more demanding and difficult. 

He has collected 500 structure-based ASCII art pieces, and used 90% of them to training and 10% for validation. Those art pieces are created by ASCII artists. And there is little difference between his pattern and those artists’, the artists will deform the original images based on their art interpretation to make their works look better while this training pattern can only copy the exactly same line structures. There are some other shortcomings of this model. The first is that it cannot change its font size or type, making it less flexible. Another one is that the placement of characters in this model is fixed so sometimes it cannot put the characters in the best place.

Here is the link of his paper: https://nips2017creativity.github.io/doc/ASCII_Art_Synthesis.pdf

And here is a live demo website: https://tar-bin.github.io/DeepAAonWeb/ (Open in Chrome) 

and its GitHub is here: https://github.com/OsciiArt/DeepAA

I can only apply images with only simple lines and without colors in the live demo website. But it has a built-in website to help you convert complicated images to line-structured images. I think it can be better to combine these two functions together. Also, I discover that there seems to be something wrong with his live demo. When you upload your images and run it, there will be a blank line between every valid line. And for the one converting the images, I think it is satisfactory.

At last, I want to talk a little about ASCII art, it is everywhere among the internet but only a small amount of people would like to dig deeper in it. The  special emoji like 🙂 , :-D, (^_^) is the most simple type of ASCII art and they are used everyday and everywhere. Some complicated one sometimes show up in social networking softwares and online forums as meme. (Like the images below) 

ASCII art was invented, in large part, because early printers lacked graphics ability and thus characters were used in place of graphic marks. Also, to mark divisions between different print jobs from different users, bulk printers often used ASCII art to print large banner pages, making the division easier to spot so that the results could be more easily separated by a computer operator or clerk (Like the image below). And it still has a strong vitality after nearly 100 years. Not like many other art styles, you can hardly find any similarity other than style itself in different works. It is simply a pattern or a tool and does not have a significance or meaning or a idea it tries to convey. Its significance and meaning is mainly decided by the original images. But it still gives us some kind of feeling. For me, one is that it brings me the atmosphere of old fashion, another one is that it is highly electronic and cyber. Also, it can show the beauty of dimness.