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Artificial Intelligence Creates Realistic Pictures of People
- jmiserez 8y agoOriginal article here: https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/17/18144356/ai-image-generation-fake-faces-people-nvidia-generative-adversarial-networks-gans https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/17/18144356/ai-image-genera... Source paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.04948.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.04948.pdf
- ivan_ah 8y agoPlaceholder doc for where the code+data will be hosted: http://stylegan.xyz/code http://stylegan.xyz/code Explainer video for the paper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSLJriaOumA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSLJriaOumA
- mtw 8y agoOne day, we're going to have google hangouts or phone calls with "people" that look, act, talk like they're real, but are actually AI. I dread when scammers will get their hands on this tech. I'm already have enough trouble getting 5 calls a day about automated voice scams, imagine getting a call from an AI that acts and talks like a real person.
- amelius 8y agoThat's when we'll switch to whitelisting.
- icelancer 8y agoMost younger people (< 30 years old) already do this anyway and refuse to answer phone calls from numbers that are not already in their contact list. I know I do and I'm not young anymore.
- russh 8y agoUnfortunately that stops being an option when your parents become elderly and missing a emergency call from an unknown number has unpleasant repercussions you would like to avoid.
- matte_black 8y agoSet your voicemail message to tell them to leave a message or to send a text.
- mrhappyunhappy 8y agoDidn’t google already create that? Fake “real” caller who can respond to what you are saying.
- placebo 8y agoGoogle Duplex https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/06/google-duplex-is-calling-we-talk-to-the-revolutionary-but-limited-phone-ai/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/06/google-duplex-is-cal...
- a3n 8y agoI dread when law enforcement get their hands on it. This will take planting evidence on a "suspect" up an order of magnitude.
- Fjolsvith 8y agoThat will be the day when you have your personal evidence recording device on 24/7 so you can prove your alibi.
- swagasaurus-rex 8y agoAnd in court they can claim the alibi is a high-fidelity fabrication.
- andrewnicolalde 8y agoBut surely then they wouldn't be immune to claims that their evidence wasn't a high-fidelity fabrication as well?
- a3n 8y agoLaw enforcement is generally given the benefit of the doubt. They're professionals.
- ben_w 8y agoNot immune, but law enforcement generally has trust-by-default from the general population, whereas everyone they accuse has distrust-by-default. I don’t know how to solve that. Not even in principle, as even a hypothetical future A.I. jury, judge, lawyer, and cop would have the “what does ‘good evidence’ mean?” problem in addition to the incentive alignment problem that already makes many of us question the justice of our laws.
- Diederich 8y agoA possible protection could be: person can emit, every N minutes, a high bit cryptographic checksum of the previous checksum plus the last N minutes of recorded video. Send that value to the 'forever', public registry in the cloud, AKA some combo of Twitter, Facebook, GMail, FastMail, AliMail, etc. To be fabricated, it would have to be done in something approaching real time. Not absolute safety, but a seemingly easy step in that direction.
- 14 8y agoI love it. I listen to my dads stories and not that long ago you could up and moves states or country and leave your past behind. Then the Internet happened and there was no escaping your past. Speeding tickets could find you. Arrests records were kept online and your identity could catch up to you in an instance. I hope more of this AI stuff takes off and we get some of that deniability anonymity back. I truly do think the Internet was an awesome landscape when people could express themselves openly and feel they were truly anonymous. These fake images may give us back some of that sense anything could be real or fake around us.
- moate 8y agoI mean, don't get me wrong, I think our society is becoming a more and more observed and cataloged as time goes on which isn't the best thing when coupled with growing distrust in government behavior, but the examples you give really don't help the cause there comrade. Your point really sounds like "I'm glad I'm able to create a more believable fake identity online so I can commit crimes and not get busted!"
- perfmode 8y agoYeah. We need to protect human rights. We don’t need mechanisms to subvert just means of accountability. It’s true that the same tools may cut both ways, but let’s keep in perspective what ends are of collective value.
- mindslight 8y agoThis philosophy is plainly false with the ongoing criminalization of victimless behavior. Most all drug possession is still heavily penalized for no collective benefit. Meanwhile the crooks on Wall Street continue unhindered, with no sign that accountability will ever come. Especially alarming is the push to tie Internet activity to real world identities, under the guise of post-facto accountability. The Internet is a medium which purposely eschewed ambient enforcement in lieu of end-to-end intelligence, and yet we're continually seeing (many successful) pushes to drag us back to that legacy post-facto natural-language imperfect-enforcement regime that benefits those in power.
- kijin 8y ago> But still, "you can’t doctor any image in any way you like with the same fidelity. There are also serious constraints when it comes to expertise and time. It took Nvidia’s researchers a week training their model on eight Tesla GPUs to create these faces." That doesn't sound like a high hurdle at all. As soon as the algorithm is known, anyone with money to burn will be able to fire up a bunch of AWS GPU instances and create authentic-looking photos of people doing something they actually didn't. If you have some relevant knowledge and want a job that lets you travel all over the place at no cost to yourself, now is the time to become a forensic expert with a specialty in detecting AI-doctored evidence. Yes, there are already people who make a living testifying in court that a document is typeset in a font that didn't exist when it was purportedly printed, etc.
- ryanmercer 8y ago>That doesn't sound like a high hurdle at all. As soon as the algorithm is known, anyone with money to burn will be able to fire up a bunch of AWS GPU instances Or their non-profitable mining rigs.
- waffl 8y agoThis reminds me of an old story of how the Japanese idol band AKB48 added a new member who turned out to be a computer composite in 2011, to think what they could do with technology today and in the future: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piZ2TkdK4Dw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piZ2TkdK4Dw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aimi_Eguchi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aimi_Eguchi
- walrus01 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idoru https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idoru
- ddtaylor 8y agoThis morning is getting stranger with every post or comment I read.
- jacquesm 8y agoWilliam Gibson foresaw that one ages ago.
- chillingeffect 8y agoheck all the theorists of the hyperreal, too, including Baudrillard, Postman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality "Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.[1] It allows the co-mingling of physical reality with virtual reality (VR) and human intelligence with artificial intelligence (AI).[1] Individuals may find themselves, for different reasons, more in tune or involved with the hyperreal world and less with the physical real world."
- ryanmercer 8y agoSomewhat related, there's also a Japanese character/synth/software package called Hatsune Miku that is flat out an animated hologram that is just a voice synthesizer for its voice. It is currently on tour...
- shawn 8y agoMost people here are talking about the dystopian aspects of this. But for a graphics programmer, this is astounding news. We're probably looking at the future of cinema. This is the way to build a next-gen renderer. Laarc thread: https://www.laarc.io/item?id=158 https://www.laarc.io/item?id=158
- hagreet 8y agoStartup idea: Suspect sketches using GANs
- jacquesm 8y agoMore likely it will end up as the opposite: fabricate a plausible accusation based on available evidence against a specific person.
- Nasrudith 8y agoIf it can run through evidence arbitrarily wouldn't that imply better general utility as a detective than a framer? "Given the available evidence and remotely plausible suspect pool x is a way better match than y."
- vbuwivbiu 8y agoimagine when people first starting telling stories 50k years ago, how it must have felt to listeners at the time "but these people you speak of don't exist!"
- lolc 8y agoWe can assume (but not prove) that people back then were deeply animistic. You could talk to them about the soul of stones and they wouldn't flinch.
- vbuwivbiu 8y agowell ok people vary - there are people today who see spirits within everything and others who take everything literally & don't get jokes or metaphors
- usrusr 8y agoIt's an interesting, even if highly speculative thought experiment: would there be much animism before storytelling? I don't think that the answer is clear. (now I'm off on a tangent reading https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deception_in_animals https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deception_in_animals )
- lolc 8y agoI would assume that our drive to see intent even in happenstance is older than language. But yeah, highly speculative. Sapir & Whorf would disagree :-)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- shreyas-satish 8y agoAside from fake news, I can't help but wonder: what is the probability that the “generated” faces do not closely resemble people IRL? An immediate use case that jumped to mind was DIY stock photos or even movies. But, with the above question still hanging, I'm not sure how comfortable I'd be using this.
- krick 8y agoWell, taken a random human from the population, what is the probability he doesn't resemble anyone else alive? This is not really a mathematical question, since "resembles" is undefined and it really depends on the biological nature of human morphology, but I'm pretty sure that except for pathologically abnormal cases the answer always will be close to zero.
- duality 8y agoFace generation is a frequent subject of study in computer vision. One way to make sure the generated faces are not just copy-pastes of some face in the training set is to look for low-level visual similarity of the generated images with the training set to guarantee that it's not "too close" to any of the actual faces used to train the model.
- autokad 8y agosome strange things about the 'generated' faces. The one face is nearly identical (1,1) (1,5), just that adding the glasses. another is that male + female generates male images. you'd expect more androgynous images to show up
- jcims 8y agoI think the sleeper in this article is at the end where they are applying the same technique to inanimate objects. Imagine what this could do to inspire designs and help people that have a good eye but aren’t able to pull it all together in the form of a finished product. With the degree of automation we’re heading towards, the era of bespoke commodity goods is going to be a money maker.
- ikeyany 8y agoSeems like this would replace creative designers with a "creative black box algorithm".
- ryanmercer 8y agoGreat, more false hopes on dating apps for me ha! They'll look more real than all of the women using snapchat filters on their profile photos.
- Kalium 8y agoYou joke, but one of the applications for this will almost certainly be to generate fake dating app profiles that look more realistic. The plague of false profiles looks set to get worse.
- ryanmercer 8y agoNo, I was being quite serious. Instead of ripping low-rez eastern European model photos now they can just churn out the 'ideal woman' for any number of cultures/sub-cultures. It won't stop at dating apps either, they'll be able to build all sorts of fake social media accounts that can generate new photo content over and over to back up a persona/legend and/or a narrative for all sorts of nefarious reasons. You'll have OGAs, private groups like PIAs, hacker/carder groups etc all doing this. Hell, you'll be able to have some 12 year old sitting in his bedroom generating private shoot content of a dozen women for whatever the most trending genres on pornhub are and selling private sets for months or years without anyone catching on. I need to start some sort of neo-amishesque group and run away from tech.
- John_KZ 8y agoNVidia's demo video is staggering.
- potiuper 8y agoDupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18675371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18675371 (video link in comments of dupe)
- throwawaymath 8y agoCan anyone tell me if it's reasonable to think this technology might substantially replace or augment movie CGI in the future? I have no domain experience with CGI or graphical simulation, but I have a passing interest as an occasional admirer of what shows up on /r/simulated. Does modern CGI make use of machine learning like this? If not, what does it have in common aside from significant use of GPUs? What are the computational intensive parts of CGI, and what are the heavily manual and labor intensive parts of the CGI development workflow?
- delinka 8y agoKeep in mind that these are stills. Once the motion starts, humans detect the not-quite-realness easily. Even the 2D video creations by AI aren’t stitched correctly, let alone getting all the details of an animated 3D person right.
- dylan604 8y agoThey are getting closer, but I do agree that it is still not quite there. It's pretty common practice now at the beginning of each film production to do full image capture of all of the main talent. It's a back up in case something untoward happens that the film can still be finished by using their 3D likeness.
- cm2187 8y agoYou mean for an Oliver Reed/Gladiator scenario?
- ptrott2017 8y agoMore commonly for postproduction fixes (think stunts and inserting talent likeness, relighting/reframing a shot, inserting reflections when CG-ing the background of a window etc.…) so you can fix sequences without having to recall talent which can produce availability delays and additional expense beyond what it takes to fix digitally.
- 8y ago
- a3n 8y agoCan the same or similar techniques be used to distinguish real from generated? Also, might this destroy the usefulness of photographic evidence?
- andersonrkton 8y agoArtificial Intelligence Creates Realistic Photos of People, None of Whom Exist... yet. Let's wait a couple years until "they" start creating these people, the next humans on Earth :)
- smusamashah 8y agoI believe that best of these generated faces will have a 90% match in training dataset. If you go through the generated faces you can see all of them have different background. These are not generated from scratch, only picked from memory to match the requirements. Each face has totally different hair and hairstyle. Have the published the training dataset?
- Madmallard 8y agoAsking the important questions
- PeterisP 8y agoI thought it was CelebA-HQ (https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B4qLcYyJmiz0TXY1NG02bzZVRGs https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B4qLcYyJmiz0TXY1NG02...) but the article states that they have made a better dataset; which isn't published yet but promised to be published in January at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SDbnM1nxLZNuwD8fQkIigUve_SlihgoCmvjN3e388Us/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SDbnM1nxLZNuwD8fQkIigUve...
- bitL 8y agoThe previous version of this published a year ago was using public CelebA dataset; and no, vast majority of generated faces were different than training dataset. You could even change latent variables for continuous "morphs" between various synthetic faces, each stage being a unique face. Read on how GANs work first if you have doubts.
- smusamashah 8y agoI have a rough idea that how it works but I am still skeptic. Faces of kids specially are unbelievable to be generated. Their backgrounds, clothes, hair facial expressions seem all very unique to that picture. I will be going through the dataset to find the matches once they release it.
- sometime 8y agoIt can be demonstrated that GANs learn to model certain image contents with separate input variables like the presence of certain objects or 3D rotations [0] all by themselves, so there is definitely more going on than simply learning to paint some image patches at certain locations and smoothly interpolating them. An image patch reveals itself directly in the training data, so the image patch could simply be stored in the network weights, but a 3D rotation or the presence of a certain class of objects cannot be learned by simply copying image patches into the weights. A 3D rotation requires at the very least a computation of foreshortening, occlusion perhaps based on a depth map. An object detector requires at the very least a feature hierarchy, perhaps binding computations that relate different object parts to the whole object. Neural networks basically learn to implement nearly arbitrary computations (up to a certain circuit depth) to produce the desired output, so you can also think of deep learning as program mining of a certain program space that is reachable by the adaptive functions in a neural network. Stephen Wolfram has written about that in his blog and talked about it in one of his podcasts. So it's basically magic much like evolution, and it will probably destroy us because it's simply too powerful. [0] https://twitter.com/phillip_isola/status/1066567846711476224 https://twitter.com/phillip_isola/status/1066567846711476224
- xte 8y agoOk, now imaging a paperless future, with plenty of surveillance devices and imaging who much can count computing powers to create fake evidence of pretty anything for tons of different purpose including, but not limited to: - orient people behavior with nearly unverifiable and absolutely plausible news; - do illegal activities as a large powerful corporation and plausible denying anything with forged proofs no one can really verify (think about what happen inside megafactories); - false accuse with skyrocketing high effectiveness anyone that disturb big&powerful; - essentially centralize even more actual society because yes, we automate, but we do not automate simply with open tech in a free market on n-th competing players and open core knowledge publicly granted by public universities but with VERY few super-giant transnational player with universities reduced at Ford-model workers "production factories". Imaging how easy we can invent a kind of "widespread illness" just to sell a dummy medicine that does nothing but cost big money so give big money to it's vendor. Imaging how easy we can depict a country, or even a small area of a nation as awful just to move people around. All things can be verified, in theory, but if all tools are made by few big&powerful and are closed black boxes our effective "verification power" it became REALLY limited and so it became our ability to communicate since being everywhere more and more "remote workers" with less physical social contacts and no really free means of communication... We do not even need censorship; it suffice suffocating unwanted news under a stream of other news and silently delete them after a certain amount of time. It's super-easy spread FUD against any unwanted news etc. Nothing new under the sun of course, only at an unprecedented level with too few that can do too much, without the need of a certain support chain like ancient dictators still need.
- mkl 8y agoI think you probably mean "imagine" rather than "imaging". We are talking about fake images and the imaging of imaginary people, so your comment is a bit confusing.
- xte 8y agoMy English is really poor. The meaning of my comment is essentially: try to image how easy will became forging false proofs for subjects with enough computational resources and skill. Add to the scenario the actual trend toward few and few subjects with knowledge and infrastructure that act as a "platform of our society"... Hope it's more clear now.
- tylerleonhardt 8y agoSlack should change their random profile pics to these
- csomar 8y agoHere is my best guess of the first usage: If I marry this men/woman, how will my kids look like? (approximatively). I wonder if there will be a Tinder app for that.
- sk_hazratali 8y agohttps://marketcapcoin.blogspot.com/2018/12/will-cryptocurrency-prices-recover.html https://marketcapcoin.blogspot.com/2018/12/will-cryptocurren...
- tyingq 8y agoSadly, the first use will likely be creating lots of more realistic shill accounts on Twitter.
- paul7986 8y agoIsn’t that what the majority of str8 daters (more so women?) do unconsciously already when using Tinder, OkCupid, etc? Like wow they are attractive.... I’d have his kid. Maybe an upcoming dating app will allow you to connect your profile pics to those who have swiped right. From there this app creates images of what your offspring would look like.
- anoplus 8y agoIf this kills dating apps. I think speed dating meetups will sky rocket.
- twism 8y agoI saw this a while ago and noticed how none of the darker skinned individuals have nappy hair. Not sure if I feel it's offensive
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- peacebro 8y agoWe are in desperate need of new forms of video/audio recording tech that verifies authenticity. Imagine something that could somehow take a hash of physical properties that could not be reversed engineered
- typeformer 8y agoLet’s make it
- typeformer 8y agoWow! Another incredible consequence of this tech is that it will actually make blockchain based confirmations of unadulterated digital assests a valuable and needed service as the amount of well crafted fakes soars exponentially. A service that I didn’t see having a big amount of market potential now seems essential.
- zwkrt 8y agoWhy block chain instead of a public key?
- typeformer 8y agoWell, I was thinking it may be easier to establish and verify chain of ownership and attribution via blockchain vs just public key.
- PeterisP 8y agoThis point has come up a lot in earlier discussions; the short summary of it is that signatures/blockchains/whatever can't provide anything useful in this regard. I really don't want to repeat all of this here, but in essence: (1) you'd need all (and I mean all, not most; so all the currently existing devices need to be replaced) of devices that can capture video (and thus can sign/confirm the thing that they captured) to be fully outside of user control, if 0.01% of devices are jailbroken, it fails; (2) you'd need all the manufacturers of such devices (which put the appropriate secrets in the devices) and all the supply chain in between to be 100% trustworthy, since if a manufacturer gives 100 phones to a spy agency that'll happily sign anything as "unadulterated" then it fails; (3) you'd need to figure out a magic way to prevent the analog loophole, as with specialized expensive optics you could project arbitrary pixels to the camera sensor so that the camera would "believe" that it's seeing the exact pixels in reality. A blockchain would allow you to securely assert things like "this data was seen and signed by device #1234/(or approved by user id #456) no later than this moment", and not more than that. It can't really prove that this data reflects reality somehow; a physical device that has the technical ability to take a picture of my face and add a "it's unadulterated" tag to it can be used (with appropriate effort) to take a fake AI-generated picture and add the same "it's unadulterated" tag.
- alexcnwy 8y agoI legit registered aistockphotos.com when I first saw that paper.
- Waterluvian 8y agoI remember when super celebrity [redacted] had her 100K stolen. You know, the package of one hundred thousand photos a celebrity has taken so that movie studios can inject their likeness without their presence? It was funny when the internet was making her say and do dumb stuff. She took it all in pretty good spirit. I think it was the porn, especially the age-deflation stuff, that finally caused her to retire from the public.
- eric24234 8y agoIs it ethical to make porn pics out of generated images ?