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How we built the Waifu Vending Machine
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y agoThe tech is interesting, but the concept and naming is pretty creepy. Waifu, from "wife", is anime slang for female cartoon characters that people get romantically attracted to. https://www.dictionary.com/e/fictional-characters/waifu/ https://www.dictionary.com/e/fictional-characters/waifu/
- _28jh 7y agoEveryone knows that. It's also literally the point of the machine.
- flor1s 7y agoI guess it's creepy in a similar way as people shooting other people virtually (in shooter video games), though a making a waifu "vending machine" adds another angle of objectification to it.
- meruru 7y agoIt should be in a similar way, but in reality people lose their minds when the topic is sexual.
- inflatableDodo 7y agoUnless it is middle aged ladies drooling over male characters from Jane Austen dramatisations.
- anigbrowl 7y agoYup, and people like Bianca Devins get killed in the fallout.
- benatkin 7y agoI don't think the point is to objectify. I think it's the opposite. It's turning objects into something that satisfies yearnings for human company, sometimes replacing it and sometimes in addition to it. It's like listening to music often because you want to hear human voices. And one big name, Hatsune Miku, is a virtual pop star with a synthesized voice, which is based on female human voices, even though it isn't based on a single human voice. As globalization moves on there are more and more people without romantic partners and/or close friends nearby and they'll use their imagination to fulfill desires they're missing.
- meruru 7y agoIt really is just fun. I don't know why people insist in assuming malice.
- Techonomicon 7y agoDoesn't have to have been made with any malice to still be creepy. Because yea, it's creepy.
- meruru 7y agoStop discrimination against creepy people!
- XaoDaoCaoCao 7y agoWhy don't you be more specific? If you get down to the guts of everything... It's all "creepy".
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- derefr 7y agoOr, to think of that another way, something doesn't have to be inherently creepy for someone to be creeped out by that thing. Sometimes disgust is a fact about the person who's disgusted, rather than a fact about the world.
- mixedCase 7y agoThe usage nowadays is largely tongue in cheek, although it isn't h/a/rd to find places where they take it at face value.
- meruru 7y ago>tongue in cheek Are you making fun of my engagement?
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoIt isn’t really offensive, it’s just 4chanish, which will appeal to certain people and not others.
- Fomite 7y ago"It isn’t really offensive, it’s just 4chanish" - those things go hand-in-hand...a lot.
- XaoDaoCaoCao 7y agoA bit of real world experience might highlight what is really offensive and garish and gruesome in the world from the masochistic pleasure of 4chan's "shocking" rhetoric.
- meruru 7y agoThe term waifu is way bigger than 4chan.
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoThat’s why I said 4chanish.
- meruru 7y agoFair enough. Worth mentioning it's from a time when 4chan had a completely different userbase (number of users on 4chan doubled during gamergate alone).
- Fomite 7y agoYeah...technically interesting, creepy AF.
- gwern 7y agoAlso: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/ch0qms/p_decomposing_latent_space_to_generate_custom/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/ch0qms/p_d...
- hanniabu 7y agoLooks like you're the creator so as some feedback it'd be nice to see a simple outline of the steps with "inactive" styling, the step you're currently on as bold (maybe with an arrow in from of it?), and as you go through it the previous steps have a checkmark appear next to it (and possibly go back to "inactive" styling). The steps could be something like this: (1) Select character, (2) Select colors, (3) Select outfit, (4) Select pose The reason I suggest this is I was a little confused on what the options were, what my future options would be, and how many options are left.
- gwern 7y agoTo clarify, I'm not the creator. Sizigi Studios uses a dataset I put together (https://www.gwern.net/Danbooru2018 https://www.gwern.net/Danbooru2018) as their primary training corpus, AFAIK, and they were partially inspired by my application of GANs to anime art (as demonstrated on https://www.thiswaifudoesnotexist.net/ https://www.thiswaifudoesnotexist.net/ and see https://www.gwern.net/Faces https://www.gwern.net/Faces for much more detail about every aspect of it), but I have never been involved with them and don't know much about what they've done other than what you can read in OP. It tickles me pink to see people following up on my anime GANs, though, especially as a startup! The Great Work goes on.
- kevinfrans 7y agoOne of the creators here -- gathering the Danbooru data in one place was definitely a big help! Anime's been a pretty nice space (both personally and research-wise) especially due to the abundance of data online, and it's great that we no longer have to manually scrape image hosts (which I've spent many hours doing in the past @ https://github.com/kvfrans/deepcolor https://github.com/kvfrans/deepcolor, https://canvasdrawer.autodeskresearch.com/ https://canvasdrawer.autodeskresearch.com/ etc).
- mc32 7y agoLobster _is_ the neue Comic Sans... although maybe it’s just carrying over the tongue in cheek cheese further.
- mdorazio 7y agoI'm actually really surprised no one did this sooner. I also wish they had posted revenue figures for the two days. To other people doing this in the future: bring (or order) a fat battery pack with an AC outlet for $100 so you don't have to keep swapping laptops and can use a mobile hotspot all day.
- chendragon 7y agoIt looks like they did have these. In one of their pictures there was a stack of Anker PowerHouse power banks/battery packs.
- kevinfrans 7y agoYeah the two batteries we lugged down to AX ended up saving the day a couple of times!
- jpindar 7y agoAnd never count on someone else's network working properly.
- kalleboo 7y agoAnd never count on wireless, period. In the end it looks like they were relying on their printer(!) as an AP...
- jdnenej 7y agoIf you can find a car charger for your laptop you will get much longer battery life as you don't have to do DC AC DC
- b_tterc_p 7y agoI would love to replicate this. It looks like the dataset is open source. https://www.gwern.net/Danbooru2018 https://www.gwern.net/Danbooru2018 I don't have a sense for hardware requirements though. Does anyone have a good idea of how much time and money it would take to train such a model?
- gwern 7y agoI'm glad you asked: https://www.gwern.net/Faces#compute https://www.gwern.net/Faces#compute Figure a few GPU-weeks and a few hundred dollars if you want to go from scratch.
- b_tterc_p 7y agoThanks! I was just in the process of digging through your stuff.
- weeb_throwaway 7y agoI saw the section about not training from scratch (via transfer learning) in https://www.gwern.net/Faces#transfer-learning https://www.gwern.net/Faces#transfer-learning. The Holo example is really impressive! How expensive is it in terms of labelled data and compute? Do you know if anyone tried this for just ahegao faces?
- gwern 7y ago> How expensive is it in terms of labelled data and compute? All the stuff you see in that page (except the BigGAN ones) is unconditional, no labels. You just dump the images in and it figures it out. StyleGAN does support labels via one-hot embedding as I understand it, but I don't know how to use it so none of my experiments use it. A few people have mentioned or used it, but there's no good documentation about how to make it work, so... For unconditional samples, it depends on how many you have and how different they are. You can see in the various examples transfer learning with a few hundred to a few thousand (with and without data augmentation). > Do you know if anyone tried this for just ahegao faces? It's funny you ask that because I was corresponding with an anonymous who was using it for just that (and ball gags). He'd run into some issues with the encoder/editing functionality and wanted advice, but the regular transfer learning worked fine. He'd compiled a small dataset of a few hundred to a few thousand examples on his own, and it worked disturbingly well: sufficiently so I didn't want to write it up. (I try to keep my site SFW.)
- weeb_throwaway 7y agoI am trying out the app at https://waifulabs.com/ https://waifulabs.com/ and the art style is kind of one-note. Most of the expressions are the same and the face shape skews towards loli. I am more into "disgusted anime girl that looks at you like you're trash" type and I couldn't find a waifu (even with their refinement steps). Really impressed that this is even possible though!
- b_tterc_p 7y agoI've played with it a few times. It seems like they have you choose features in the space in the order of base -> palette -> art style (loosely) -> pose, but have locked some emotion controlling vector to be happy. Probably a reasonable step for their audience.
- meruru 7y agoI think a large majority of anime art have happy expressions, so it might not have been anything that they had to do. Edit: "disgusted anime girl that looks at you like you're trash" is the theme of a recent book that got adapted into anime, so it's a bit of a fad currently. I thought that was worth mentioning.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Thriptic 7y agoSounds like there needs to be more tsundere in the data set.
- liuru 7y agohttps://imgur.com/a/ZFrliiO https://imgur.com/a/ZFrliiO Here's one that's somewhat "annoyed" but not quite "disgusted" hm.
- a2tech 7y ago..ick
- meruru 7y agoAll that drawing and character design practice for nothing I guess.
- userbinator 7y agoDon't forget that this would not have been possible if it weren't for the human creation of art. Machines cannot really think, but they can leverage and amplify.
- jchw 7y agoThese things are pretty damn impressive, but I would guess like self driving cars, we’re pretty far away from them displacing humans at the same task. It does seem like technology in this vein could be used to help the creative process, though on that note it’s only as good as its data set, which is of course something a human has to handle for now. Even if robots replace human illustration in short order, it will probably never stop being a fun hobby, and I imagine neural networks were bound to be at least involved in the process at some point. People still draw on paper even though it’s hard to argue against the benefits of modern digital drawing.
- meruru 7y ago>I would guess like self driving cars, we’re pretty far away from them displacing humans at the same task That does NOT make me happy. Self-driving cars are just around the corner!
- imtringued 7y agoFrom what I've seen the end result contains a lot of artifacts. If I were in the market for a poster I'd still want a real artist to use the generated version as a rough sketch and redraw it properly.
- Causality1 7y agoReminds me of the Deep Learning work from StyleGAN. https://twitter.com/_Ryobot/status/1096565388165300225 https://twitter.com/_Ryobot/status/1096565388165300225
- gwern 7y agoOne of the inspirations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20511824 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20511824
- sb057 7y agoPSA: I get a horrific 5 GB< memory leak immediately upon opening the tool's page.
- hmahncke 7y agoWalk up to the station, and you'll be greeted with a quick array of girls. After each step, the booth narrows your choices -- eventually leading to a final screen, where you can "adopt" the girl on the spot. Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.
- meruru 7y agoThe world isn't going to end because of war or famine or anything like that, but because humans will be too infatuated with their artificial partners to bother reproducing.
- judge2020 7y agoNot even an artificial problem: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/27/japan-shrinking-as-birthrate-falls-to-lowest-level-in-history https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/27/japan-shrinkin...
- meruru 7y agoThese articles never mention it, but I do think waifu culture contributes to the issue. I personally never looked for a partner because I'd rather spend more time watching anime.
- pault 7y agoI'm single and 40 and I have no interest in dating because I would 100x rather be in my workshop building keyboards than out meeting people.
- meruru 7y agoHonestly, I feel kinda guilty about it. Shouldn't the people who care so much about their craft that they forgo relationships be precisely the kind that we'd want to preserve the genes of?
- userbinator 7y agoRandom semi-useful idea: use an SSH public key as input, giving a very memorable image for verification. I could also see something like this having applications in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identicon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identicon generation.
- thanatropism 7y ago“Anime girls” look all the same to me. There was a time where I didn’t listen to rock music; Pantera and Green Day would sound the same. Memorable is up to cultural fluency...
- meruru 7y agoIt's like food connoisseurism. You get a sense for subtleties if you spend enough time with it.
- teddyh 7y agoxkcd #915 is titled “Connoisseur”: https://www.xkcd.com/915/ https://www.xkcd.com/915/
- FrozenVoid 7y agoSuprisingly such concept exists, there is a subreddit dedicated to finding art in modern photography. http://www.reddit.com/r/AccidentalRenaissance/ http://www.reddit.com/r/AccidentalRenaissance/
- derefr 7y agoThe one thing I've always wanted from identicons is for the system to use a mixed generator composed of at least 20 different algorithms, that all produce results that are completely different-in-kind (like abstract shapes vs. cartoon monsters vs. anime girls vs. swatched spirographs vs. pixel cities vs. ...), such that it's unlikely that any two anonymous users in a smaller conversation will end up with identicons that you have to inspect to differentiate. (E.g. hopefully, if there are two users with identicons of the same style, then they would have very different base colors, which is impossible if all the identicons are of the same style.)
- swsieber 7y agoI'm not sure how you're shipping your posters, but here's a tip: When shipping posters, use triangle tubes, not circular tubes, it saves you money. [0] https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6549769659112054784/ https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6549769...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- p1mrx 7y agoI suggest using the money saved to include some chocolate, so people aren't disappointed.
- kevinfrans 7y agoOne of the creators here, the team at Sizigi and I are glad to answer any questions!
- meruru 7y agoThanks for making this, it's awesome. How much of a plagiarist I am if I make my characters using this and pretend they are original?
- liuru 7y agoHaha, not a plagiarist at all :) Please do! That's exactly what this is for: turning data into an extra bit of inspiration.
- ve55 7y agoGreat work! Do you have any thoughts to share on the future of this area? Anything specific with this project, future projects you might work on, or just the idea of profiting from AI-generated art to begin with?
- liuru 7y agoNothing specific so far. We did this because we thought it would be very cool :)
- thekevan 7y agoI don't care about the how, why the hell would you?
- FrozenVoid 7y agoNeat but lacks variety(all same pose and template) and too little steps to select. Resolution of final image is too low. I think same thing could be done with human images, if you can make it 7-10 selection steps(to pinpoint more fine features).
- karanlyons 7y agoA lot of these look like children. Nowhere in the article is it mentioned that a lot of these look like children. No one in the comments has brought up that a lot of these look like children. A lot of these look like children.
- chrischen 7y agoYou must be new to Japanese culture.
- azernik 7y agoNote that this isn't actual Japanese culture; it's made by an SF-based game studio [https://sizigistudios.com/ https://sizigistudios.com/] for an expo in LA [http://www.anime-expo.org/ http://www.anime-expo.org/].
- GolDDranks 7y agoHowever, much of the training data is likely to be of Japanese origin.
- tortasaur 7y agoThere's a pretty simple reason: it's irrelevant to the subject of the article.
- meruru 7y agoWhat did you learn today?
- golergka 7y agoIn this artistic style, any character appearance would get more child-like characteristics. It's more of a feature of the overall "childish" view of the world associated with this style rather than an attempt to picture actual children. Of course, it's just my perception and your interpretation may be different.
- throwaway99111 7y ago
- bdon 7y agoNeato. What are the copyright implications of commercializing this though?
- gwern 7y agoShould be safe, modulo issues about software patents: https://www.gwern.net/Faces#faq https://www.gwern.net/Faces#faq
- tofof 7y agoThe dataset this is built from (https://www.gwern.net/Danbooru2018 https://www.gwern.net/Danbooru2018) is, simply put, copyright-infringing on a gross scale. The vast majority of the images uploaded to 'boorus' completely lack a compatible license or the artist's express consent. The redistribution via torrent of 2.5 TB of some 3 million images only compounds this problem. None of this is ameliorated by the $20 'generosity' of the dataset creator. As a result, every single artist whose work was included in that dataset has a clear, meaningful claim that each and every 'waifu' sold ($20, if customized, or $5 if random) by Sizigi Studios is an infringing derivative work. Coupled with at least one of the project authors' ready admissions -- in this very comment section -- of scraping image sites himself, I would say that this team is playing with fire. Even in the case that an algorithm's output is somehow found to be 'creative' rather than mechanistic, AND this specific application is found to be in all cases substantially transformative, there's STILL the original massive 2.5 TB of copyright infringement up front to deal with. All an enterprising lawyer would need to begin is to search the BigQuery metadata for the 'artist' and 'copyright' tags on these images. Note of course that the 'copyright' tag is widely misused on boorus and similar image repositories to refer to the inspiring franchise; 'trademark' would be much more accurate descriptor. EDIT: I do not mean to suggest that litigation from the use of the dataset in this ML (as opposed to the original, clearly infringing, download & redistribution) would in any way be an easy, one-sided case --- only that this scenario would represent nearly the worst possible test case imaginable for determining the future legality of ML, short of directly antagonizing the RIAA or MPAA.
- bdon 7y agoInteresting. How would you respond to an argument that the output of a ML model is transformative / fair use? Would your argument apply to this specific application, or to ML in general?
- tofof 7y agoObviously the question of whether an ML model is adequately transformative is an unanswered one, at least as far as I'm aware, in any jurisdiction. However, in this specific case, I would expect most courts to place heavy weight on the clear, initial massive-scale infringment from the dataset alone to conclude that no good-faith effort (or, apparently, any effort at all) was made to avoid trampling these artists' rights. Such 'dirty hands' would potentially discredit any attempt to claim original creative expression, rather than commercialism, motivated the creation of this ML model. This represent very nearly the worst possible case to serve as a potential test case for the legality of ML techniques. Other datasets, like the Open Images Dataset (https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.00982 https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.00982) explicitly recognize and address this concern in their curation of included images.
- euske 7y agoYeah, yeah, but what about the gender equality in tech? I know this is a kind of joke in the men's club, but it's appalling that people somehow appreciate it publicly.
- meruru 7y agoIf anime waifus were a cause of gender inequality, anime wouldn't have the huge female following that it has.
- needle0 7y agoNote that Comiket, the biggest dojinshi (amateur zines) market in Japan that attracts over a half million attendees semiyearly, has a larger percentage of female exhibitor attendants than males. The notion that anime/otaku culture is overwhelmingly occupied by males is patently false. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comiket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comiket
- meruru 7y agoYeah, my experience with anime clubs and events is that females are the majority about as often as males. It's a stark contrast with the sausage fest that is computer programming activities.
- Grue3 7y agoThat's true. I once attended Comiket on day 2 and it was quite shocking that at least 90% of attendees on that specific day were women. This would never happen at any western comic convention.
- GuiA 7y agoDuring my many years in this community I don’t believe I have ever commented “this doesn’t belong here” because I understand that “anything that gratifies a hacker’s curiosity” is broad by design, and will lead to submissions that some find objectionable. But this is perverted, misogynistic trash that doesn’t belong on HN front page.
- garbre 7y agoFrankly, I refuse to believe so many people on HN have the kind of scruples about or lack of exposure to this part of AmerOtaku culture. As such, I believe many of the comments are simply 2nd-degree trolling. Also, the post title is misspelled. It's "building", not "builing".
- weeb_throwaway 7y agoI think I refused to believe it too until reddit, a San Francisco company, started banning people for posting fictional high school anime characters in bikinis (not even nudes).
- FearNotDaniel 7y agoI'm not quite sure what point you're trying to make here. But it sounds like you're trying to say the sexual objectification of children is okay, as long as they are fictional children with a tiny amount of body covering. Is that what you meant, or did you mean something else?
- claudiawerner 7y agoWhat do we mean by "okay"? How do we differentiate virtual murder (for example) from virtual pedophilia in a sufficiently rigorous way? You can say that rigor isn't required beacuse Reddit can make whatever choices they like, but it's not at all clear that the necessary connection for sexual objectification of children is made when these images are posted - that presupposes that the viewer sees the image and real children in the same light, which current evidence gathered of Japanese fan communities does not support (see Galbraith and McLelland's work on this). This is why researchers in the field are sometimes skeptical about calling this material "child pornography". Morally, one can differentiate between virtual murder and virtual pedophilia and condemn virtual pedophilia while consistently enjoying games and other media depicting murder - but as Gary Young pointed out in his piece on the Gamer's Dilemma, it requires us to accept moral relativism.
- subjectsigma 7y ago
- 1282431276 7y agoHi