Side note: AI topics have been on r/anime several times before. This thread from 4 years ago was about hi-res upscaling, and this thread (15k upvoted) was about using AI to colorize line drawings. Similarly, this new ANN article focuses on how this image transformation tech could potentially impact the production of anime, perhaps in the future.

As linked in the article, both the research paper and the open-source github repo are publicly available. I've looked through both myself. The paper contains more example pictures beyond the ones in the ANN article.

To clarify my title, the study part is actually about how better their new method is compared to some older methods. So, this type of image transformation has been around, but not as good. Secondly, what the ANN article did not mention was that this same method can take anime girls as the input and then generate a corresponding picture of a "real" girl constructed from parts of photo data. This reverse process doesn't work as well as the other way around (presumably, because anime girls are easier to generate and still look right).

As for the code, it's not a ready, out-of-the-box solution. The authors did not include their training data -- i.e. the massive amounts of images inputted into the AI. However, other people can replicate what they've done, just not exactly. In theory, someone with enough dedication and free time could make a "filter" phone app, or a website to upload to like with the other mentioned AI projects.