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AI tech generates entire bodies of people who don't exist

169 points by mmastrac 8y ago

p1necone 8y ago
My arch enemy; tiny low res thumbnails strikes again!
- p1necone 8y ago
  Although there is one higher res image available, which is better than usual. Of course it's high enough res to show that there's visible artifacting. But this is pretty impressive. I wonder if an easy hack would be to train a second separate neural network to clean up the kind of artifacting that you get out of the first neural network...
  - squarefoot 8y ago
    "I wonder if an easy hack would be to train a second separate neural network to clean up the kind of artifacting that you get out of the first neural network..." Shhhh, don't give the evil web overlords ideas for new nasty captchas :)
  - pontifier 8y ago
    My understanding is that this is exactly how these images are generated. One network makes the image, and another tries to find flaws... They both get better together. Here's the first 2 Google results for "GAN" meaning "Generative Adversarial Network" https://skymind.ai/wiki/generative-adversarial-network-gan https://skymind.ai/wiki/generative-adversarial-network-gan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_netwo...
fgheorghe 8y ago
“Entire bodies”
acconrad 8y ago
would this mean that outside of runway models, you wouldn't need models to showcase your clothing anymore since you can just "wrap" your clothes over these AI humans?
- keenmaster 8y ago
  Exactly. If you're Gap and have a lineup with thousands of articles of clothing, why would you go through the trouble of procuring models? You have to deal with modeling agencies, photographers, set managers, etc... When the AI gets good enough, it will be even better than the alternative. It will serve ads showing only your body type. Maybe the models will even have....your face.
  - Para2016 8y ago
    That would be great. You don't need a floor length mirror and changing rooms if you can just have your rendered body and face to exchange clothes on. Need to get accurate measurements for the right dimensions though.
    - jonfw 8y ago
      This leads to more very cool stuff. 3D body scanning to get a representation of your body. Than use software to automatically generate and cut clothing patterns to get the exact fit you're looking for. TNow all that's left is stiching, which would be fairly difficult to automate when patterns are variable so would still be a significant cost point for custom clothing.
    - simiones 8y ago
      That would depend on very accurate cloth physics simulation as well. This is way beyond what the article is showcasing, it's not even in the same ballpark.
  - kro92kfmrzz 8y ago
    It could lead to more than just putting casual models out of work. Fewer stylists and designers would be needed. Let the AI generate the color patterns (sticking with Gap as an example, it might retain their chosen /size as constraints) and boom, on demand styling
williesleg 8y ago
Hell, Michael Jackson did it way back in the 1980's. I guess he was indeed a time traveler. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTFE8cirkdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTFE8cirkdQ
revskill 8y ago
This is useful to generate models for clothing shop, or new fashion models. More general: I'm not surprised to see some day, one AI bot could automatically register a Twitter account, and have "real" conversations there. One day, i might retweet their tweets, too.
- candiodari 8y ago
  Given how many people build AI bots for on twitter, you've very likely already done this.
- squarefoot 8y ago
  Some day more and more movies will have virtual actors, possibly licensing physical/voice tracts from known stars of the past. I would expect also virtual music bands to be created as such.
  - genema 8y ago
    Or maybe they'll sort through all of the publicly available voice data for any actor and start talking and sounding exactly like them. No need for any actors.
beautifulfreak 8y ago
I always wonder about their use as movie extras. Does anyone here know what's happening in the realm of movie-making? I had friends who did that as a lark, but there were pay minimums, so I imagine it's a substantial expense to studios.
- cwkoss 8y ago
  Many crowd scenes are full CGI (can't tell at a distance) or composites of many shots of smaller crowds stitched together.
fixTheTitle 8y ago
Needs a title change: “AI tech generates [images of] entire bodies of people who don't exist”
bsanr 8y ago
One wonders if the people whose photos were used to build this system were compensated appropriately for their contribution. Something tells me that royalties were not discussed. Uncompensated, or grossly under-compensated, use of personal data for AI systems is a serious issue that one no one seems to want to address.
- RenRav 8y ago
  I think that every time I see these AI people generators. Do they release their training sets of images, or is there even a way to check?
  - protomyth 8y ago
    I’m sure some lawyer will get the list in discovery the first time it comes a bit close to a model’s look. I do wonder if they have the list, though.
- daenz 8y ago
  Serious question, what are the legal implications for using a publicly available online image for ML training?
- true_religion 8y ago
  > One wonders if the people whose photos were used to build this system were compensated appropriately for their contribution. Stock photos exist. It's not as if researchers are trawling facebook to build their AI models. Just looking at the output, and the unnaturally specific body poses, I'd guess they just put in an order for 50,000 stock photos and went on from there. If you negotiate, you can trivially get it down to 0.10 per image which is just 5000 dollars. And by trivially, I mean just email several sources saying your budget is in the low thousands. So most likely, everyone got compensated. All rights were preserved.
fromthestart 8y ago
I'll bet one could use GANs now to generate high res textures for 3D models. Say for video games or other 3D renders. In various styles too. BRB next startup idea.
- lucidrains 8y ago
  This has already happened to some degree. The technique is so easy, kids out there are using it to immediately renovate old games overnight https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/18/18311287/ai-upscaling-algorithms-video-games-mods-modding-esrgan-gigapixel https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/18/18311287/ai-upscaling-alg...
shmageggy 8y ago
On the importance of language: generating "entire bodies" is a different class of problem then generating images of bodies
- dang 8y ago
  The title is awkwardly worded, but I don't think it's so unclear. If the people don't exist then neither do the bodies.
areoform 8y ago
While AI models might replace catalogue models for small labels that are starting out (maybe) and for e-commerce companies (definitely). I highly doubt it that they will replace real models for large companies and fashion boutiques now or ever. Because what people (women and men) are buying is aspiration wrapped in dead plant fibers. The reason why I buy a dress from Hervé Leger is because I want to look like old school Crawford making body-con a thing in the ‘90s https://media.glamour.com/photos/56959302d9dab9ff41b2a79b/master/w_1600%2Cc_limit/fashion-2015-09-cindy-crawford-black-herve-leger-dress-1996-main.jpg https://media.glamour.com/photos/56959302d9dab9ff41b2a79b/ma... and make the painful process of getting into that shape and look seem “easy” while doing it. Fashion isn’t about looking good in of itself. It’s about social proof-of-work. Knowing what to wear and pulling it off isn’t easy. It’s the raison d’être of the multi-billion dollar fashion and fitness industries. Women eat grass all day everyday and go on ridiculous juice cleanses while contorting their body into shapes that would put a pretzel to shame. If the world endures so much pain to look effortlessly good, Why should manufacturers be allowed to forego the pain? If the root of aspiration is making the impossible look like a breeze, then why would anyone want to buy from a computer generated perfect model that never had to feel the pull of a difficult stretch and stare in the mirror with guilty eyes? The suspension of disbelief necessary for the social economy to function crumbled as soon as something is too perfect. Like Instagram photos. It’s not cool to slap on a filter anymore and stage a perfect photo. It’s too easy now. Just like Prisma was. What’s cool is to put in the work and make something imperfect so that everyone knows that you put in the effort and looked unflappably blasé while doing it. Most models that are hired today are hired partly on their social presence. Having an audience, even a micro-audience, is essential for getting high paid gigs, because brands aren’t just selling the look; they’re selling the whole package associated with the look. Women like to buy from other women (and men like James Charles) whom they can aspire to. Tweens and teens want to look like the models on tik-tok. Young-adults and grown women want to look like their favorite YouTuber and Instagram celeb. They all want to participate in making something cool happen with their friends. All of this and more is intrinsically social and human. All of this and more means that as long as humans buy from other humans, brands will hire models to appeal to what’s most human; sexy, sexy crazy-making envy.
- tastygreenapple 8y ago
cryptokernel 8y ago
This is an interesting development. hmm.. Just leaving this here: Do tasks, get paid. Join us in the CoinCircle website to start earning crpyto https://coincircle.com/l/50VVxbObg3 https://coincircle.com/l/50VVxbObg3
nate 8y ago
Super interesting. How soon does this tech become the next 6-7 figure instagram start? Curious if anyone can take this soon to build a following around a fake beautiful person doing fake interesting things.
- visarga 8y ago
  They are not something new, they've been in the news in the last 5 years. I'm talking about GANs. Their 'father' Ian Goodfellow, has been recently poached by Apple from Google. Even NVIDIA is into GANs [1]. Thousands of papers have been written on the topic [2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOxxPcy5Gr4&t=56s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOxxPcy5Gr4&t=56s [2] http://www.arxiv-sanity.com/search?q=generative+adversarial+networks http://www.arxiv-sanity.com/search?q=generative+adversarial+...
Nition 8y ago
Is this really generating anything new or is it essentially just morphing between existing photos that it's been trained on? It would be interesting to take some of these GAN demos and write a utility where for each output, have it find the closest-matching training input, and see how similar it is.
- Iv 8y ago
  Typically these animations that look like morphings are generated by auto-encoders. Contrary to automatically generated morphings, you'll notice that all intermediate person is realistic. I don't think GAN work that way (I haven't followed it last year though). My understanding is that a GAN simply tries to determine if an image is generated or authentic. I suppose they used one there. One way to do what you propose would be to plot all the training pictures in the kernel space of the autoencoder and match the closest one to the generated picture.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - tzakrajs 8y ago
    The intermediates are not realistic. There are many artifacts and they are obscured by the small, lossy video.
- plutonorm 8y ago
  This similarity of model output to training data, by pixel to pixel similarity, is often included in ML papers. The GAN here will very likely be producing uniques images in each case, some will be closer to the training data. But in general GANs are very capable and can for instance imagine a person with red hair wearing a green jacket even if it has never seen this combination of things before.
- gambler 8y ago
  >Is this really generating anything new or is it essentially just morphing between existing photos that it's been trained on? To answer this one would need to invest time into researching something that might potentially deflate the AI hype, so no one is doing it. Training dataset similarity analysis I usually see in these papers is downright laughable.
harigov 8y ago
They can use this technology to generate a model to fit a particular user profile. Filter bubbles are going to get even better! Or maybe they can ask user to upload his photo and feed that as a prior to the model so it can generate visuals of that person wearing different dresses. That would be cool!
- genema 8y ago
  That would be neat. Imagine going to a site, adding some photos of yourself and seeing all the clothes as they would look on you based on your actual dimensions. You'd never have to wonder if something would look good on you. I imagine this would save a ton of shipping costs on returns.
  - simiones 8y ago
    The AI showed here is not even a step in that direction. If you want photo-realistic images of how a piece of clothing would look on your body you need: - very accurate measurements of your body - a very accurate representation of the materials used in that piece of clothing, including weight, tensile strength etc. - a very accurate physics simulation matching the materials to your body measurements The technology showcased here does nothing similar. It could perhaps generate pictures of what someone who looks sort of similar to your general body shape, as seen in your pictures, looks in clothes. It would be no better than what you currently have: look at the picture, and try to guess how well that fits your actual body. Even worse, you would completely miss details like "the material is very stretchy, it looks good on the model's abs but it might look bad on my belly fat" because the AI would NOT be doing a simulation of how that clothing actually fits a human body - it's always producing an idealized simulation. Edit: and to make this clear, I'm not saying that "the AI can't do that yet". I'm saying that the technique they are using can't achieve the goal you are talking about. There is nowhere near enough detail in pictures of clothing to get the kind of simulation you are looking for.
1k 8y ago
Amazing! This pretty much enables clothing brands to generate extremely targeted ads on the fly. Models can have similar body shape, hair style, skin colour to the user. Based on past photos the advertiser can figure out preferred colours, patterns and possibly even styles.
- vidarh 8y ago
  "Mirrors" in a store display that shows the clothes on "you". And conveniently adjusts your figure...
Iv 8y ago
https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ has done that for a while...
- Smaug123 8y ago
  Even with complete bodies? AFAIK, your link is only heads.
devinplatt 8y ago
Maybe someday instead of seeing models in a catalog I could see renderings of myself in the clothing?
gdubs 8y ago
It’s fascinating how in the 80s and 90s we imagined virtual worlds being populated by 3D graphics built on modeled / digitized wireframes — and then this technology comes out of nowhere in the past decade. The holodeck seemed so implausible in its ability to just synthesize things. Doesn’t seem so implausible anymore. “Computer: Sherlock Holmes, in his study, speaking with Albert Einstein.”
- colllectorof 8y ago
  Stop peddling meaningless hype. Current 3D rendering technology is lightyears ahead[1] of these AI toys and you can trivially parametrize it. Many games already do. So if you want to generate people, you already can do that while having full control, instead of some glitchy sliders. Something genuinely useful might, perhaps, be achieved by applying GANs to parameters of those 3D models to allow easier customization, but I haven't seen any work in that direction. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZ9mb3Jylb0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZ9mb3Jylb0
  - TomMarius 8y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hW1_Sidq3m8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hW1_Sidq3m8 Looks better to me than a lot of what is on your video. The video is very nice and it's really good, however it's often not really photorealistic when it's supposed to be and I also don't believe it'll be possible to do raytracing at such performance it'll be usable for most people (mobile phones), for VR. This approach is a new way that sidesteps the issues of raytracing.
  - wongarsu 8y ago
    With all the work on making these ML models controllable it seems like they now have a decent concept of things like "tall person" or "wears glasses". I assume it would be entirely possible to replace the last few layers and generate 3d models instead of images. Nobody is doing that right now because nobody has training data for that, and generating such training data is hard (or expensive). But it seems like it should be in reach of someone with a profitable use case.
nurettin 8y ago
This would have marketing value if the network could somehow generate the person wearing a particular clothing.
Tharkun 8y ago
I'm sure this could have applications in porn as well. Want to cater to someone's specific kink? Just generate it.
- jjjensen90 8y ago
  I do wonder if we'll ever reach a liberal enough society to be OK with machine-generated porn of all types, especially those taboo or illegal now (child pornography, sadism, zoophilia, etc). I could foresee it being banned before it even gets commercialized, which in my opinion would be unfortunate because I could see it as the methadone of porn to the "real stuff's" heroin.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    That's already illegal in the US:[0] > Child pornography under federal law is defined as any visual depiction of sexually explicit conduct involving a minor (someone under 18 years of age). Visual depictions include photographs, videos, digital or computer generated images indistinguishable from an actual minor, and images created, adapted, or modified, but appear to depict an identifiable, actual minor. But that's not so in Japan. So one ought take care when torrenting Japanese films in the US. 0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_pornography_laws_in_the_United_States#Definition_of_child_pornography_under_federal_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_pornography_laws_in_the_...
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - yibg 8y ago
    Interesting moral implications. Should e.g. child porn still be illegal if no child is harmed? I think most people's natural reaction would be of course it should be illegal, it's child porn!
    - caprese 8y ago
      In the US there is a 1st amendment exception for obscenity under which these kind of prohibitions leverage. Obscenity itself requires an average expectation of what obscenity is, otherwise the exception dissipates entirely. It is therefore easy for me to see that the technological availability of this would change it. there would be attempts by executive branch and legislature that are obliged to simply say something “should” be illegal, and a court wouldnt be able to agree with that on constitutional grounds
alok-g 8y ago
News previously posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19806373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19806373
rand84545 8y ago
This makes me think about descartes' devil, if in such a short time we are able to generate fake bodies. What if we could generate fake people (not necessarily conscious but behaving as if they are.) in the future. and with enough advances in brain/computer interfaces one could live a whole life without meeting a real human . In fact, in that case, one wouldn't even need accurate models since there would be no baseline to compare to. Or maybe, we could implement surgical lenses that applies a filter on other people generating a fake person. You can basically, eliminate _ism(s) in the workplace by making everyone look and sound the same. People can pay to make their images in others' eyes different. Or one can pay to make their spouse look like a their true love in their eyes.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
turk73 8y ago
The Stones nailed this in 1967 with "2000 Man": Well my wife still respects me I really misused her I am having an affair With a random computer
hjk05 8y ago
I never trust these unless they show the generated images next to the nearest images in the training set. I have a strong suspicion that most just end up being training set picks. Which invalidates the claim that these people/models/whatever do not exist.

169 points by mmastrac 8y ago

p1necone 8y ago

My arch enemy; tiny low res thumbnails strikes again!

p1necone 8y ago
Although there is one higher res image available, which is better than usual. Of course it's high enough res to show that there's visible artifacting. But this is pretty impressive. I wonder if an easy hack would be to train a second separate neural network to clean up the kind of artifacting that you get out of the first neural network...
- squarefoot 8y ago
  "I wonder if an easy hack would be to train a second separate neural network to clean up the kind of artifacting that you get out of the first neural network..." Shhhh, don't give the evil web overlords ideas for new nasty captchas :)
- pontifier 8y ago
  My understanding is that this is exactly how these images are generated. One network makes the image, and another tries to find flaws... They both get better together. Here's the first 2 Google results for "GAN" meaning "Generative Adversarial Network" https://skymind.ai/wiki/generative-adversarial-network-gan https://skymind.ai/wiki/generative-adversarial-network-gan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_netwo...

fgheorghe 8y ago

“Entire bodies”

acconrad 8y ago

would this mean that outside of runway models, you wouldn't need models to showcase your clothing anymore since you can just "wrap" your clothes over these AI humans?

keenmaster 8y ago
Exactly. If you're Gap and have a lineup with thousands of articles of clothing, why would you go through the trouble of procuring models? You have to deal with modeling agencies, photographers, set managers, etc... When the AI gets good enough, it will be even better than the alternative. It will serve ads showing only your body type. Maybe the models will even have....your face.
- Para2016 8y ago
  That would be great. You don't need a floor length mirror and changing rooms if you can just have your rendered body and face to exchange clothes on. Need to get accurate measurements for the right dimensions though.
  - jonfw 8y ago
    This leads to more very cool stuff. 3D body scanning to get a representation of your body. Than use software to automatically generate and cut clothing patterns to get the exact fit you're looking for. TNow all that's left is stiching, which would be fairly difficult to automate when patterns are variable so would still be a significant cost point for custom clothing.
  - simiones 8y ago
    That would depend on very accurate cloth physics simulation as well. This is way beyond what the article is showcasing, it's not even in the same ballpark.
- kro92kfmrzz 8y ago
  It could lead to more than just putting casual models out of work. Fewer stylists and designers would be needed. Let the AI generate the color patterns (sticking with Gap as an example, it might retain their chosen /size as constraints) and boom, on demand styling

williesleg 8y ago

Hell, Michael Jackson did it way back in the 1980's. I guess he was indeed a time traveler. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTFE8cirkdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTFE8cirkdQ

revskill 8y ago

This is useful to generate models for clothing shop, or new fashion models. More general: I'm not surprised to see some day, one AI bot could automatically register a Twitter account, and have "real" conversations there. One day, i might retweet their tweets, too.

candiodari 8y ago
Given how many people build AI bots for on twitter, you've very likely already done this.
squarefoot 8y ago
Some day more and more movies will have virtual actors, possibly licensing physical/voice tracts from known stars of the past. I would expect also virtual music bands to be created as such.
- genema 8y ago
  Or maybe they'll sort through all of the publicly available voice data for any actor and start talking and sounding exactly like them. No need for any actors.

beautifulfreak 8y ago

I always wonder about their use as movie extras. Does anyone here know what's happening in the realm of movie-making? I had friends who did that as a lark, but there were pay minimums, so I imagine it's a substantial expense to studios.

cwkoss 8y ago
Many crowd scenes are full CGI (can't tell at a distance) or composites of many shots of smaller crowds stitched together.

fixTheTitle 8y ago

Needs a title change: “AI tech generates [images of] entire bodies of people who don't exist”

bsanr 8y ago

One wonders if the people whose photos were used to build this system were compensated appropriately for their contribution. Something tells me that royalties were not discussed. Uncompensated, or grossly under-compensated, use of personal data for AI systems is a serious issue that one no one seems to want to address.

RenRav 8y ago
I think that every time I see these AI people generators. Do they release their training sets of images, or is there even a way to check?
- protomyth 8y ago
  I’m sure some lawyer will get the list in discovery the first time it comes a bit close to a model’s look. I do wonder if they have the list, though.
daenz 8y ago
Serious question, what are the legal implications for using a publicly available online image for ML training?
true_religion 8y ago
> One wonders if the people whose photos were used to build this system were compensated appropriately for their contribution. Stock photos exist. It's not as if researchers are trawling facebook to build their AI models. Just looking at the output, and the unnaturally specific body poses, I'd guess they just put in an order for 50,000 stock photos and went on from there. If you negotiate, you can trivially get it down to 0.10 per image which is just 5000 dollars. And by trivially, I mean just email several sources saying your budget is in the low thousands. So most likely, everyone got compensated. All rights were preserved.

fromthestart 8y ago

I'll bet one could use GANs now to generate high res textures for 3D models. Say for video games or other 3D renders. In various styles too. BRB next startup idea.

lucidrains 8y ago
This has already happened to some degree. The technique is so easy, kids out there are using it to immediately renovate old games overnight https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/18/18311287/ai-upscaling-algorithms-video-games-mods-modding-esrgan-gigapixel https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/18/18311287/ai-upscaling-alg...

shmageggy 8y ago

On the importance of language: generating "entire bodies" is a different class of problem then generating images of bodies

dang 8y ago
The title is awkwardly worded, but I don't think it's so unclear. If the people don't exist then neither do the bodies.

areoform 8y ago

While AI models might replace catalogue models for small labels that are starting out (maybe) and for e-commerce companies (definitely). I highly doubt it that they will replace real models for large companies and fashion boutiques now or ever. Because what people (women and men) are buying is aspiration wrapped in dead plant fibers. The reason why I buy a dress from Hervé Leger is because I want to look like old school Crawford making body-con a thing in the ‘90s https://media.glamour.com/photos/56959302d9dab9ff41b2a79b/master/w_1600%2Cc_limit/fashion-2015-09-cindy-crawford-black-herve-leger-dress-1996-main.jpg https://media.glamour.com/photos/56959302d9dab9ff41b2a79b/ma... and make the painful process of getting into that shape and look seem “easy” while doing it. Fashion isn’t about looking good in of itself. It’s about social proof-of-work. Knowing what to wear and pulling it off isn’t easy. It’s the raison d’être of the multi-billion dollar fashion and fitness industries. Women eat grass all day everyday and go on ridiculous juice cleanses while contorting their body into shapes that would put a pretzel to shame. If the world endures so much pain to look effortlessly good, Why should manufacturers be allowed to forego the pain? If the root of aspiration is making the impossible look like a breeze, then why would anyone want to buy from a computer generated perfect model that never had to feel the pull of a difficult stretch and stare in the mirror with guilty eyes? The suspension of disbelief necessary for the social economy to function crumbled as soon as something is too perfect. Like Instagram photos. It’s not cool to slap on a filter anymore and stage a perfect photo. It’s too easy now. Just like Prisma was. What’s cool is to put in the work and make something imperfect so that everyone knows that you put in the effort and looked unflappably blasé while doing it. Most models that are hired today are hired partly on their social presence. Having an audience, even a micro-audience, is essential for getting high paid gigs, because brands aren’t just selling the look; they’re selling the whole package associated with the look. Women like to buy from other women (and men like James Charles) whom they can aspire to. Tweens and teens want to look like the models on tik-tok. Young-adults and grown women want to look like their favorite YouTuber and Instagram celeb. They all want to participate in making something cool happen with their friends. All of this and more is intrinsically social and human. All of this and more means that as long as humans buy from other humans, brands will hire models to appeal to what’s most human; sexy, sexy crazy-making envy.

tastygreenapple 8y ago

cryptokernel 8y ago

This is an interesting development. hmm.. Just leaving this here: Do tasks, get paid. Join us in the CoinCircle website to start earning crpyto https://coincircle.com/l/50VVxbObg3 https://coincircle.com/l/50VVxbObg3

nate 8y ago

Super interesting. How soon does this tech become the next 6-7 figure instagram start? Curious if anyone can take this soon to build a following around a fake beautiful person doing fake interesting things.

visarga 8y ago
They are not something new, they've been in the news in the last 5 years. I'm talking about GANs. Their 'father' Ian Goodfellow, has been recently poached by Apple from Google. Even NVIDIA is into GANs [1]. Thousands of papers have been written on the topic [2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOxxPcy5Gr4&t=56s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOxxPcy5Gr4&t=56s [2] http://www.arxiv-sanity.com/search?q=generative+adversarial+networks http://www.arxiv-sanity.com/search?q=generative+adversarial+...

Nition 8y ago

Is this really generating anything new or is it essentially just morphing between existing photos that it's been trained on? It would be interesting to take some of these GAN demos and write a utility where for each output, have it find the closest-matching training input, and see how similar it is.

Iv 8y ago
Typically these animations that look like morphings are generated by auto-encoders. Contrary to automatically generated morphings, you'll notice that all intermediate person is realistic. I don't think GAN work that way (I haven't followed it last year though). My understanding is that a GAN simply tries to determine if an image is generated or authentic. I suppose they used one there. One way to do what you propose would be to plot all the training pictures in the kernel space of the autoencoder and match the closest one to the generated picture.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- tzakrajs 8y ago
  The intermediates are not realistic. There are many artifacts and they are obscured by the small, lossy video.
plutonorm 8y ago
This similarity of model output to training data, by pixel to pixel similarity, is often included in ML papers. The GAN here will very likely be producing uniques images in each case, some will be closer to the training data. But in general GANs are very capable and can for instance imagine a person with red hair wearing a green jacket even if it has never seen this combination of things before.
gambler 8y ago
>Is this really generating anything new or is it essentially just morphing between existing photos that it's been trained on? To answer this one would need to invest time into researching something that might potentially deflate the AI hype, so no one is doing it. Training dataset similarity analysis I usually see in these papers is downright laughable.

harigov 8y ago

They can use this technology to generate a model to fit a particular user profile. Filter bubbles are going to get even better! Or maybe they can ask user to upload his photo and feed that as a prior to the model so it can generate visuals of that person wearing different dresses. That would be cool!

genema 8y ago
That would be neat. Imagine going to a site, adding some photos of yourself and seeing all the clothes as they would look on you based on your actual dimensions. You'd never have to wonder if something would look good on you. I imagine this would save a ton of shipping costs on returns.
- simiones 8y ago
  The AI showed here is not even a step in that direction. If you want photo-realistic images of how a piece of clothing would look on your body you need: - very accurate measurements of your body - a very accurate representation of the materials used in that piece of clothing, including weight, tensile strength etc. - a very accurate physics simulation matching the materials to your body measurements The technology showcased here does nothing similar. It could perhaps generate pictures of what someone who looks sort of similar to your general body shape, as seen in your pictures, looks in clothes. It would be no better than what you currently have: look at the picture, and try to guess how well that fits your actual body. Even worse, you would completely miss details like "the material is very stretchy, it looks good on the model's abs but it might look bad on my belly fat" because the AI would NOT be doing a simulation of how that clothing actually fits a human body - it's always producing an idealized simulation. Edit: and to make this clear, I'm not saying that "the AI can't do that yet". I'm saying that the technique they are using can't achieve the goal you are talking about. There is nowhere near enough detail in pictures of clothing to get the kind of simulation you are looking for.

1k 8y ago

Amazing! This pretty much enables clothing brands to generate extremely targeted ads on the fly. Models can have similar body shape, hair style, skin colour to the user. Based on past photos the advertiser can figure out preferred colours, patterns and possibly even styles.

vidarh 8y ago
"Mirrors" in a store display that shows the clothes on "you". And conveniently adjusts your figure...

Iv 8y ago

https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ has done that for a while...

Smaug123 8y ago
Even with complete bodies? AFAIK, your link is only heads.

devinplatt 8y ago

Maybe someday instead of seeing models in a catalog I could see renderings of myself in the clothing?

gdubs 8y ago

It’s fascinating how in the 80s and 90s we imagined virtual worlds being populated by 3D graphics built on modeled / digitized wireframes — and then this technology comes out of nowhere in the past decade. The holodeck seemed so implausible in its ability to just synthesize things. Doesn’t seem so implausible anymore. “Computer: Sherlock Holmes, in his study, speaking with Albert Einstein.”

colllectorof 8y ago
Stop peddling meaningless hype. Current 3D rendering technology is lightyears ahead[1] of these AI toys and you can trivially parametrize it. Many games already do. So if you want to generate people, you already can do that while having full control, instead of some glitchy sliders. Something genuinely useful might, perhaps, be achieved by applying GANs to parameters of those 3D models to allow easier customization, but I haven't seen any work in that direction. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZ9mb3Jylb0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZ9mb3Jylb0
- TomMarius 8y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hW1_Sidq3m8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hW1_Sidq3m8 Looks better to me than a lot of what is on your video. The video is very nice and it's really good, however it's often not really photorealistic when it's supposed to be and I also don't believe it'll be possible to do raytracing at such performance it'll be usable for most people (mobile phones), for VR. This approach is a new way that sidesteps the issues of raytracing.
- wongarsu 8y ago
  With all the work on making these ML models controllable it seems like they now have a decent concept of things like "tall person" or "wears glasses". I assume it would be entirely possible to replace the last few layers and generate 3d models instead of images. Nobody is doing that right now because nobody has training data for that, and generating such training data is hard (or expensive). But it seems like it should be in reach of someone with a profitable use case.

nurettin 8y ago

This would have marketing value if the network could somehow generate the person wearing a particular clothing.

Tharkun 8y ago

I'm sure this could have applications in porn as well. Want to cater to someone's specific kink? Just generate it.

jjjensen90 8y ago
I do wonder if we'll ever reach a liberal enough society to be OK with machine-generated porn of all types, especially those taboo or illegal now (child pornography, sadism, zoophilia, etc). I could foresee it being banned before it even gets commercialized, which in my opinion would be unfortunate because I could see it as the methadone of porn to the "real stuff's" heroin.
- mirimir 8y ago
  That's already illegal in the US:[0] > Child pornography under federal law is defined as any visual depiction of sexually explicit conduct involving a minor (someone under 18 years of age). Visual depictions include photographs, videos, digital or computer generated images indistinguishable from an actual minor, and images created, adapted, or modified, but appear to depict an identifiable, actual minor. But that's not so in Japan. So one ought take care when torrenting Japanese films in the US. 0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_pornography_laws_in_the_United_States#Definition_of_child_pornography_under_federal_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_pornography_laws_in_the_...
  - deleted 8y ago
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- yibg 8y ago
  Interesting moral implications. Should e.g. child porn still be illegal if no child is harmed? I think most people's natural reaction would be of course it should be illegal, it's child porn!
  - caprese 8y ago
    In the US there is a 1st amendment exception for obscenity under which these kind of prohibitions leverage. Obscenity itself requires an average expectation of what obscenity is, otherwise the exception dissipates entirely. It is therefore easy for me to see that the technological availability of this would change it. there would be attempts by executive branch and legislature that are obliged to simply say something “should” be illegal, and a court wouldnt be able to agree with that on constitutional grounds

alok-g 8y ago

News previously posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19806373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19806373

rand84545 8y ago

This makes me think about descartes' devil, if in such a short time we are able to generate fake bodies. What if we could generate fake people (not necessarily conscious but behaving as if they are.) in the future. and with enough advances in brain/computer interfaces one could live a whole life without meeting a real human . In fact, in that case, one wouldn't even need accurate models since there would be no baseline to compare to. Or maybe, we could implement surgical lenses that applies a filter on other people generating a fake person. You can basically, eliminate _ism(s) in the workplace by making everyone look and sound the same. People can pay to make their images in others' eyes different. Or one can pay to make their spouse look like a their true love in their eyes.

deleted 8y ago

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turk73 8y ago

The Stones nailed this in 1967 with "2000 Man": Well my wife still respects me I really misused her I am having an affair With a random computer

hjk05 8y ago

I never trust these unless they show the generated images next to the nearest images in the training set. I have a strong suspicion that most just end up being training set picks. Which invalidates the claim that these people/models/whatever do not exist.