FTA: "So it didn’t learn how to make one from the other. It learned how to subtly encode the features of one into the noise patterns of the other. The details

FTA: "So it didn’t learn how to make one from the other. It learned how to subtly encode the features of one into the noise patterns of the other. The details of the aerial map are secretly written into the actual visual data of the street map: thousands of tiny changes in color that the human eye wouldn’t notice, but that the computer can easily detect." I would not have used the word "secretly". The buildings and trees were filtered out, but not completely. The reverse transformation just amplified the noise back into buildings and trees.