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This person does not exist
- jonplackett 7y agoI have a question - When generating a new person (or whatever it is that does not exist) can you know that it isn’t like any of the images that went into the training data set? How likely is it for it to actually exist after all?
- lsb 7y agoThe model has 18x512 parameters, and all 9000 parameters are 32-bit floats. Even assuming only 16 bits of randomness for each parameter (to keep them small enough, so you don't get too wild, because the center of 0 is a pretty homogenized face), 16^9000 is a lot of permuations of faces. They will, of course, borrow from all of the 70k faces on Flickr that power StyleGAN, in varying degrees.
- steerablesafe 7y ago> Even assuming only 16 bits of randomness for each parameter Well, this is the question. How do you know that you can make that assumption? Also even though you have ~9000 parameters they could be highly dependent.
- jonplackett 7y agoCould it by chance recreate on an input image though? Is it not possible, or just incredibly unlikely? I also wonder how similar to an original person it needs to be before you would believe it's them anyway.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y agoYou could use this argument to say that GANs can't overfit if you provide them, say, 16 bits of randomness per parameter, which is patently not true.
- nly 7y agoJust from a dozen refreshes I'm pretty sure Zuckerberg is in their training set.
- hnuser123456 7y agoSome of the backgrounds are surprisingly consistent, but some are distorted in ways that can only be done by a deep NN that sort-of knows what it's doing. The fact that the face is (almost always) still completely believable seems like good evidence against overfitting.
- merricksb 7y agoOriginally submitted just on 12 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19144280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19144280 (872 points, 242 comments)
- dtakuma 7y agoSeems like it has been vastly improved since then [1]. The results are much better than when originally posted in HN. [1] - https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.04958 https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.04958
- salgernon 7y agoI remember it from the subproject, < http://thiscatdoesnotexist.com http://thiscatdoesnotexist.com > although that doesn't seem to have improved. It feels more like a "this transporter accident doesn't actually exist dot com". (Just a joke; its fun.)
- nineteen999 7y agoI was messing with the demo of Character Creator 3 the other week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnviGWO0wbU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnviGWO0wbU It has a "machine learning" based projection mode where you can project a single photo of a face on the head of a character mesh and it will create somewhat believable set of 3D features from the photograph on the model. It was fun to take a couple of the generated faces from this site and apply them to the models. I imagine you could do a lot with just those two things if you had the talent of the artist in the video I posted above. You could create fully rigged and clothed characters for games in a fraction of the time it would take to make them entirely from scratch, and for much less expense and cleanup (I would have thought) than full body scanning.
- thomashusa 7y agoWow! Imagine allowing people to upload their profile picture in and RPG and suddenly their character actually looks like them. Imagine playing online with your friends and all of their characters look just like them. Really Cool! But also slightly weird.
- dsmurrell 7y agoBut can you do it from DNA?
- lsb 7y agoStyleGAN (v2, which is this, and v1 before it) is spectacularly high quality. Even more interestingly, you can interpolate between faces very smoothly. (For instance, I was able to give some face off the street a drag makeover, by interpolating that face plus or minus the face of a drag queen minus that performer's face out of drag: https://leebutterman.com/assets/lsb5-plus-trixie-minus-brian.mp4 https://leebutterman.com/assets/lsb5-plus-trixie-minus-brian... ) But it can be tricky to encode faces if they look out of the ordinary, where "ordinary" is the 70k faces on Flickr that trained StyleGAN.
- Angostura 7y agoI'm intrigued about the possibility of using these as stock photos - it dies away with the need for model permissions (or does it?). Presumably the copyright on the image resides with the person who ... programmed the neural net? Trained the neural net? Is running the server?
- Someone 7y agoI would guess the one picking the photos and training parameters would have the largest part of the copyright. Whether courts will decide others have some rights to is TBD. The persons whose images the net was trained with also might have, certainly if the network was trained with only a few images.
- mcv 7y agoHow does copyright work when you have no idea the photo even exists? Are these photos dynamically generated on the fly when a page is loaded? Because if so, then the visitor is the only person to have seen that particular photo, and there'd be no way for any copyright owner to even know they might hold the copyright over that particular photo.
- buboard 7y agowell if you do, please train a dataset that is a bit more zoomed out.
- amelius 7y ago>I'm intrigued about the possibility of using these as stock photos Another (darker) possibility is to generate copyrighted images. Once you have (say) a trillion photos, it will be hard to generate a new one that doesn't look (in essence) like one you already have.
- mkl 7y agoCopyright doesn't work that way: "copyrights can only be infringed if the infringer has access to the copyrighted work and engages in actual copying of the work" https://www.trademarkwise.com/blog/2015/2/4/copyright-infringement-or-coincidence https://www.trademarkwise.com/blog/2015/2/4/copyright-infrin..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity
- ackshually 7y agoThere was a pic of an older guy, but what was unsettling was the woman peeking over his shoulder; like a friend or a family member, leaning into the photo. Her eyes were melting into black and white streaks curling down over her sagging cheeks; her smile was perfectly white, and just a little too long. I refreshed on instinct, and haven't seen anything like it since.
- hnuser123456 7y agohttps://i.imgur.com/RmSEnaT.jpg https://i.imgur.com/RmSEnaT.jpg https://i.imgur.com/RhROFSf.jpg https://i.imgur.com/RhROFSf.jpg https://i.imgur.com/NTC2ZiN.jpg https://i.imgur.com/NTC2ZiN.jpg
- ainiriand 7y agoThe horror.
- ak39 7y agoIt is the AI equivalent of a genetic mutation.
- Izmaki 7y agoThis one is sure to haunt me: https://imgur.com/a/lGsRX3n https://imgur.com/a/lGsRX3n
- ainiriand 7y agoOh Jesus, it is like one of those Cronenberg movies.
- tachyonbeam 7y agoYou have to imagine some strong AI in 2030, video chatting with people using fake human avatars, and people can sometimes tell because there's weird fleshly artifacts moving in the background.
- Forgivenessizer 7y agoThese are not being generated on the fly, are they?
- tonyedgecombe 7y agoNo, if you quickly refresh you might get the same one again.
- ryankrage77 7y agoThey must have generated a massive dataset then, I downloaded 50,000 images and didn't get any duplicates.
- fctorial 7y agoThis person does not exist in the training database. Imagine seeing your lookalike in here.
- codegladiator 7y agoAt what point can one say the lookalike is actually one's image ?
- thepete2 7y agoThey don't let you download the image unless you have the right user agent. How impolite of them.
- paulpauper 7y agoThe fake web is going to be even bigger than the dark web. it may already be
- buboard 7y agoit may well all be for the better. A web full of people shouting about everything and putting everything they got in public is not useful.
- codeduck 7y agoreminds me of Artificial Inanity and the Rampant Orphan Botnets referenced in [Anathem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem)
- fit2rule 7y agoAn artist friend of mine is using this technology in an interesting way .. she's drawing regular street portraits of people she meets, and then using that as the seed to generate new pictures of people who do not exist. It has produced some extraordinarily disturbing art, especially for those of us who were her subjects. Some of the images are so wild and out there, it really is an adventure into ones own psyche. I see so much in the generated images that creates an intense emotional response, and its very difficult to differentiate between the lines of the artist and the lines of the code, at least in a way that is easily discernible. Her art as the seed definitely amplifies things - the emotions of eyes, the despair of cheeks and lips - in a way that the generative programming enhances, 1000x .. Very interesting stuff, and I'm looking forward to her exhibit of this work - especially the live demonstrations.
- mkl 7y agoDoes she have any online, on DeviantArt or Instagram or something?
- ijpsud 7y agoYou can play with the code[0] for this really easy if you've got a Nvidia GPU with nvidia-docker[1] installed: docker run --gpus all -it anibali/pytorch:cuda-10.1 bash # copy images to container with `docker cp` pip install stylegan2_pytorch stylegan2_pytorch --data ./images [0] https://github.com/lucidrains/stylegan2-pytorch https://github.com/lucidrains/stylegan2-pytorch [1] https://github.com/NVIDIA/nvidia-docker https://github.com/NVIDIA/nvidia-docker
- toto444 7y agoThey all have the same teeth.
- thdrdt 7y agoWhat is the likelihood that the generated person does exist? I got the feeling this could turn out the same as people using fake email addresses to later discover that the domain in fact exists (that's why you should always use example.com).
- mmahemoff 7y agoGood question. I would guess it's very low if we're talking exact match. It would have to match N features. There's effectively an infinite number of combinations, many more than the 8 billion people curently living. In reality, there are already real-world doppelgangers, where a typical observer would confuse two (unrelated) individuals. I'm guessing that could happen with a synthetic image too, but it's probably not any worse than a real-world matching error. (The bigger concern is the related one of deepfakes, which don't need any kind of synthesis, they just act directly on the real person's image.)
- ekianjo 7y ago> "Imagined by a GAN" There's no imagination involved.
- shrubble 7y agoI remember the site hotornot.com ; will there be another one, BotOrNot.com ?
- beefield 7y agoNow, the next obvious question is, how do you pick one of these non-existing persons and generate images of him/her doing different things in different places? (Or, of course, real persons. Is there a service where I can upload my photo and it starts to generate images of me doing random - or not so random - things?)
- dtakuma 7y agoEven better if you could generate that and add some kind of aging to the no-person.
- gwern 7y agoYou can reverse-engineer faces into the original random seed/embedding, and then tweak the embedding to 'edit' the face. (There are a bunch of tools and Colab notebooks for that, but the best tool is definitely Artbreeder, which does a lot of other GAN models too: https://artbreeder.com/ https://artbreeder.com/ ) However, since the model only does faces centered in an image, you're restricted to different headshots: make them smile or frown, or wearing sunglasses, or different hair color, or animate lip flaps, yes, but not 'doing different things in different places', unless you can figure out some way to insert a headshot into a bigger photo.
- meehatpa 7y agoAlmost all the women with their ear visible have something shiny in the lobes.
- dep_b 7y agoThe background, clothing and especially other people in the image are still a dead giveaway that it's not a real person. It's kind of weird how the algorithm borks something relatively simple as the texture of clothing.
- worldsayshi 7y agoYeah, you'd think that some GAN scheme would be able to weed that out?
- dep_b 7y agoI don't know but I imagine somebody might want to generate an algorithm that puts random clothes on people. There's so much money going on in the fashion industry and beautifying. If you can see how a new shirt fits on an existing person you can also fit a shirt on a fake person right?
- angrygoat 7y agoHere’s the Guardian article which linked the site: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/feb/07/ai-in-the-adult-industry-porn-may-soon-feature-people-who-dont-exist https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/feb/07/ai-in-the-ad... To my mind there is a massive need for us in the software world to pause and think about the ethics of all of this. Engineers more broadly have well developed ethical codes, we should too.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- umvi 7y agoSo are you saying software developers should have to take the equivalent of a Bar exam in order to practice software development in a given state? That way ethical code violations have teeth because you can be debarred. As of now anyone and their dog can practice software development and I'm not sure what a nebulous "ethical code" would imply for them.
- rpastuszak 7y agoArguably software engineering compared to engineering in a broader sense has a bigger issue with the “we did this because we could, not because we should” attitude. I feel like a “formalised ethical code” would result in more clever approaches of avoiding it. We don’t need to look far to find the examples (looking at ya ad tech)
- speedgoose 7y agoThis has improved so much since the last time I checked it. It's interesting to see so high quality on image generation using neural networks, while text generation using gpt2, which seems a lot easier at first, is glorified nonsense.
- tyingq 7y agoIs part of it deliberate avoidance of women with both ears + earrings showing? That was one of the tells before...one earring or a mismatched pair. Now the women mostly seem to be in poses where you can only see one ear, or no ears (hair covering them). There is, this time, much less craziness with hair sprouting from the wrong places.
- not2b 7y agoSince they are using an adversarial training method, perhaps the NN that is voting "thumbs down" could learn that mismatched jewelry means "fake".
- mmahemoff 7y agoMeet the social media pundits for the next presidential election.
- credit_guy 7y agoNow try this: http://whichfaceisreal.com/ http://whichfaceisreal.com/
- codesternews 7y agoCheck the background :D
- Spare_account 7y agoI'm 10 for 10 when I use the background to work it out. There are always little imperfections and whirls that give it away.
- iainmerrick 7y agoAt least in these images, the skin and clothes are also not great if you zoom in.
- draxofavalon 7y agoAlso look at ears and earrings.
- frogpelt 7y agoIf they're wearing glasses do the glasses look they were beaten into shape with a mallet?
- smegger001 7y agoor melt into the face
- alephnil 7y agoIn addition to the background, if you can see earrings, that is usually a giveaway. The generated faces seems to always have different earrings in each ear. Also glasses disappear into the skin, and ears are often different on each side and/or distorted.
- mirimir 7y agoMaybe Mirimir and my other personas should get selfies.
- MichaMeier 7y agoSome people generated there seem oddly familiar. Too bad, I am not good with remembering names or I would frequently go: "oh that is <xyz> from <abc.inc>. How did his/her picture end up here?"
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ChrisMarshallNY 7y agoIt's improved. I used to be able to tell the fakes by the ears, but that seems to have been fixed.
- TremendousJudge 7y agoAnd the teeth! It was common for the teeth to be uneven. They are still a little bit weird but I remember it being much worse
- ChrisMarshallNY 7y agoI am seeing some very slight issue, where the bottom of a top tooth is close to the lower lip.
- RocketSyntax 7y agothat robo cat is going to haunt my dreams
- skat20phys 7y agoWhat's really amazing to me is the rendering quality, if that's the right word for it, the resolution. This seems different to me than the "structural realism" in the sense of how plausible the face is in it being representative. Not sure if there are terms for this but it's amazing to me how realistic things like skin texture are independent of "higher level" features.
- mirado 7y agoI love this site and use it for my news. It's funny to find this here.
- RodgerTheGreat 7y agoIt has been interesting to see images clearly generated by this service (same artefacts, same resolution) start to flood online dating apps and social media profiles. Previously, fake accounts tended to use photos which could be reverse-image-searched to detect them. Luckily, it doesn't seem that this approach can be sensibly extended to generate entire scenes, or multiple entire-body photos from different angles. Believability breaks down tremendously in less constrained datasets- see https://www.thiscatdoesnotexist.com https://www.thiscatdoesnotexist.com for example.
- ovi256 7y agoThat may very well be because the datasets are not large enough to densely cover the underlying data distribution - which is what these current deep learning models need. Francois Chollet talked about it on Twitter and in some of his papers. An exciting possibility that is opened by these generative models is synthetic data. Train (well) a generative model on private data, then share the generated syntetic data without privacy violation concerns. Of course, this opens the way to data laundering - profiting from ilegally obtained data that you're not supposed to have. Possibly by laundering through several jurisdictions, where each local step is legal. What will be the Dutch sandwich of data laundering ? The cyber dystopian novels of the 90s have nothing on this.
- kunle 7y agoThere's a couple of startups programmatically generating entire new scenes using only words as the input (target use cases are movies/animations/gaming). The output quality isn't yet as high as the OP site, but we're max 18 months out from something like www.thisplacedoesnotexist.com or something like that. Edit: one such startup is https://opus.ai/ https://opus.ai/
- krapp 7y agoOf course a killer app for this sort of thing would be customizable models for VR porn.
- 7y ago
- tomrod 7y agoSo, the specific person may not exist, but likely someone very, very similar in appearance does. I've come across people in life that I would have sworn were twins. I'm curious how combinatorically low the number of facial features need to be before people resemble one another.
- VeninVidiaVicii 7y agoMy gut reaction is that the model does an apparently credible job of simulating faces, but cannot take into consideration their underlying biology. I would think a lot of the features these non-existent people have might be biologically incompatible for reasons we don't know. Facial features are incredibly sensitive to exposure to gene:environment interactions. So, I have doubts today they look like anyone real.
- duxup 7y agoI grew up in the midwest in an area where a lot of Germans settled many decades before I was born. Later in life I traveled to Germany and just felt ... comfortable. I didn't speak the language or anything, wasn't talking to a lot of people, I simply saw all these faces that I felt I knew... It was a very sudden change as I had already been to England, France, Italy and etc where things felt foreign and different. Then blamo, Germany and here are all these people I recognize / half recognize.
- Baeocystin 7y agoSimilar situation, in that my family line is essentially 100% German, although I grew up elsewhere. When we visited my grandparents' home city, it was kind of a shock how much I looked like everyone else. It didn't make me feel particularly comfortable or uncomfortable either way, but it did surprise me how, well, related we all looked in a way that had never happened to me before. My favorite part of the trip, though, was getting complimented on my English by other friendly but clueless tourists who asked me for directions and the like. I told them thank you, my parents were very insistent that I practice my English from a young age. Technically the truth! :D
- martin_a 7y ago
- Simon_says 7y agoBetter: thiswaifudoesnotexist.net
- gwern 7y agoI updated that last month with S2 samples, incidentally, so it's comparable.
- sub7 7y agoMakes me so happy I took "Computers, Ethics and Social Responsibility" in college. These algorithms are tools and at their worst they are powerful weapons - much more dangerous than some nuclear bomb that wipes out a few hundred square miles.
- OscarCunningham 7y agoI noticed there are very few black people and none with very dark skin. But there are lots of people of many other ethnicities. Was dark skin avoided because it's inherently harder for the algorithm?
- goodside 7y agoThe training data contains examples of very dark skin: https://github.com/NVlabs/ffhq-dataset/blob/master/ffhq-teaser.png https://github.com/NVlabs/ffhq-dataset/blob/master/ffhq-teas...
- OscarCunningham 7y agoInteresting. I just refreshed the site 100 times to get a large sample size and the darkest skinned image it produced was this girl (https://i.imgur.com/ggJIG94.png https://i.imgur.com/ggJIG94.png). Her skin is much lighter than many of the people in that sample of the training data. Assuming that that sample is representative of all the training data, it must be that the algorithm is 'choosing' not to produce images of dark skinned people. Perhaps because it isn't very good at them and 'knows' this? I wonder if there are other features it's deliberately avoiding?
- iamnothere 7y ago> Assuming that that sample is representative of all the training data, it must be that the algorithm is 'choosing' not to produce images of dark skinned people. Perhaps because it isn't very good at them and 'knows' this? I wonder if there are other features it's deliberately avoiding? An algorithm would not have this kind of insight. (This is just a GAN trained on face data.) To say that an algorithm like this is "deliberately" doing anything is a misunderstanding. Most generators like this that I've seen, like GPT-2, require you to provide a "seed" of some sort, such as a sentence fragment. They then build off of this seed. I don't know if this is implemented that way, but if so, perhaps the developer provided a set of seed data that leads to this result. There may also be a sort of "averaging" involved (see another commenter's note about the women having similar features), and depending on both the training data and the seed, this may result in a preference towards certain features. Edit: it's StyleGAN.
- workingkamil 7y agoactually, that‘s a picture of my cousin
- tartoran 7y agoI noticed that some people have some kinf of skin cancer blip or some other weird anomaly. Is the algo not able to filter those out?
- achow 7y agoAsk HN - Any equivalent - 'This Voice Does Not Exist'? It would be awesome to have that for a project that I'm thinking of.
- kstenerud 7y agoI wouldn't be surprised if someone soon comes up with a porn generator based on this tech.
- lwi19 7y agoBeautiful fakes but a simple trick can identify them quickly: The right and left side of these faces are too similar. This is not the case with real people.
- nautilus12 7y agoI just realized the potential this has for ruining dating apps by filling up the majority of people on the program with fake generated people that just waste enough of the participants time that they never get anywhere.
- ogre_magi 7y agoI use this to generate faces for NPCs in my TTRPGs.
- bagacrap 7y agoI looked at about 50 faces trying to find one with a strong jawline or hard cheekbones. Although the features and hair are very realistic, the algorithm does seem to stray away from distinctive features. The women especially have uniformly round and soft faces.
- tommaho 7y agoI can't spot the fake human faces on mobile, but man some of those cats are nightmare fuel!
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y agoWhat's the current state of the art on controllable GANs? Like if you wanted to build a thispersondoesnotexist but with the ability to control e.g. gender, smile, sunglasses, ethnicity?
- gwern 7y agoI believe S1/S2 still are effectively SOTA for static face image editing. (Note that S2 added a projector and has better latent spaces than S1; see the paper.) You can play around with them at https://artbreeder.com/browse https://artbreeder.com/browse among other ways.
- clSTophEjUdRanu 7y agoI've seen this. It would be neat to randomly generate faces until it generates a "doppelganger" of yourself.
- teddyuk 7y agoIt would be really funny if someone managed to use someone’s phone camera to take a photo and make it look like the site was showing their own face.
- robga 7y agoMy humble entry into the this x does not exist pantheon: https://thisbutterflydoesnotexist.com/ https://thisbutterflydoesnotexist.com/
- boublepop 7y agoOm my book “x doesn’t exist” demonstrations are absolutely worthless if they don’t as a minimum show at least one “closest” member of the training set. You could set up a script that just randomly picked one out of 50 images of my closest family and no one would know the difference from going to it.
- BenjiWiebe 7y agoExcept for the occasional horrible creepy deformed things seen sometimes... Or is that your family too?
- boublepop 7y agoThe point is that you aren’t demonstrating the implied value in the generated content. Deformations and artifacts are easy to add to images. The concept here is that this is supposedly an image of someone who doesn’t exist, if what you see is just a test-set image that’s deformed or has an artifact added to make it look like it was automatically created then it’s not actually doing anything... but the point is that you have no frame of reference to judge that because you are only seeing the supposed non existing face. So it’s only impressive is you take it for granted that it’s doing what is claimed. It’s impressive if you assume it’s impressive. What I’m saying is simply that if they want to claim it’s impressive you should be able to judge that based on the displayed result itself. Just include the nearest match and it’s simple as hell for everyone to judge if it actually did something cool or not.
- teilo 7y agoWhy is it that the eyes are often slightly off on so many of these? Many are fine, but the majority seem to have a slightly lazy eye.
- rednerrus 7y agoIf you look at enough of these they all start to look alien.
- kmeade 7y agoThis gynoid was damaged in the vat. https://i.imgur.com/BMoGUVo.jpg https://i.imgur.com/BMoGUVo.jpg
- dr_j_ 7y agoI wonder could the generated faces now be used to actually do further training? Even from scratch for other, similar GANs? Doing so might remove any privacy concerns about real world data being used to train these things (going forward)