I wonder how many years it'll take for someone to train a neural network to generate emojis for all possible modifiers, regardless of whether they're currently real combinations.

The Google keyboard on Android (and, I think iOS) already lets you do this[1]. Go to the emoji picker on the keyboard and select an emoji or two. You get 4-5 suggestions of randomly added modifiers for the selected emoji.

https://9to5google.com/2020/12/03/gboard-emoji-kitchen-expan...

There's Emoji Mashup Bot+ - "Tries to create new emojis out of three random emoji parts"

https://twitter.com/emojimashupplus

Nice! A more "old-school" procgen-like approach, but that makes it all the more elegant in how effective it is in its simplicity

Intuitively, I think this would be doable today with style transfer networks. But maybe there wouldn't be enough training data with existing emojis.

I hope someone who knows more about it can tune in...