16 ms·

Show HN: This Fursona Does Not Exist

207 points by arfafax 7y ago

Loughla 7y ago
This has far fewer oddities than the people based ones. Maybe that's because furry art all have similar qualities already, so it's easier? A few of them were just straight up Judy from Zootopia, so that says something gross about the furry community, I'm sure. Also, I hate this. I especially hate the loading messages.
- dylz 7y ago
  What does that say that's gross?
  - Loughla 7y ago
    I'm learning about some of my personal biases through this, apparently. I just assume furries/fursonas/furry fandom/whatever it's called is about sex.
    - some_furry 7y ago
      > I just assume furries/fursonas/furry fandom/whatever it's called is about sex. Nope! :3 https://faq.dhol.es/@Soatok/furry-fandom/is-furry-a-sex-thing https://faq.dhol.es/@Soatok/furry-fandom/is-furry-a-sex-thin... It's a common misconception. We're more about community than anything. (That's not saying that sex doesn't happen between adults, but that's not what it's about, for everyone.)
    - Lammy 7y ago
      In my experience, any activity or community enjoyed by humans has a subgroup for “that thing, but also with sex”. It’s more of a reflection of what it means to be human than anything to do with the means of that expression.
    - GauntletWizard 7y ago
      It is mostly about sex. Most furries are spergy enough not to realize that the tingly feeling they get from the baby talk is a sexual pleasure, though.
      - rsynnott 7y ago
        This is a pretty weird assumption, especially when you extend it to, say, those people who do faux-medieval re-enactments. One can dress up and get in a character without it being about sex. Don't see the appeal myself, but "it's all about sex" is a weird leap.
        GauntletWizard 7y ago
        Having been in a ren-faire and had friends in the SCA... Holy crap, have you picked a bad comparison, if you're trying to refute my point. Edit: To provide a bit more context: Mating dances in most bird species are not direct indicators of evolutionary fitness, but they are what is selected for. SCA events, Fursonas, and the like are the postmodern equivalent of mating dances. They are Conspicuous Consumption, Veblen-good displays of "I can spend my time doing this self-defining thing instead of productively". That's fine and dandy. I'm not judging people for making their mating dance some form of roleplay (because most any formal competition displays the same traits).
        rsynnott 7y ago
        ... That's about sex? I would have thought it would be very uncomfortable, with all the anachronistic chain mail and so on. Edit responding to you edit: Okay, based on that thesis pretty much everything, beyond the bare essentials of life, is about sex. Which doesn't really sound plausible.
        GauntletWizard 7y ago
        Life is about reproduction, yes. Nearly every non life-sustaining activity is about sex, and that's not even a thesis, that's an axiom. But very specifically: Furry conventions are about sex. The drunken orgy room parties are far better attended (And yes, I have seen hotel contracts that prove this) than the "main event". Nerd conventions are about sex. SCA events are about sex. They are not exclusively, but as social activities, one of their significant motivating factors is mate-shopping, and there is every indicator that the other advantages of social activity (collaboration and trust building, trading, etc) are not significant motivating factors. People don't get jobs from BDSM conventions (Actually, they do, and then those workplaces go under because hiring people because you're fucking them is dumb).
  - blackearl 7y ago
    It doesn't need to be gross to dislike the weird baby talk "uwu" stuff. Although seeing it in much more technical contexts will make me laugh - https://github.com/mpaland/printf/issues/15 https://github.com/mpaland/printf/issues/15 - "Scawy big no functionality at all UwU #15"
    - cosmojg 7y ago
      Wow, that person seems to do this in all of the issues they file. They're also really good at filing issues despite the baby talk. All of their issues are well-researched and immediately actionable with a surprising amount of debugging completed before the initial submission.
      - Baeocystin 7y ago
        Devs tend to have a penchant for the absurd. The details may change along with the zeitgeist, but the personality quirk itself seems to be ubiquitous across the decades.
        bluntfang 7y ago
        >Devs tend to have a penchant for the absurd. Ok this is just a stereotype that's not true.
        Baeocystin 7y ago
        :: notes reply comes from a commenter with a name that sounds like a fursona :: ...you're messing with me, aren't you. :D
        bluntfang 7y ago
        not really sure what you mean, can you elaborate on why you would say that? FWIW, I've met more normies in my 10years of software development than absurd people. Absurd people are just memorable, it's a bias. If you're actually curious, this username was stolen from an absurd Atlanta based rapper named blunt fang and I get more weed culture association than furry association with it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDal4GCyEJA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDal4GCyEJA
- proverbialbunny 7y ago
  The dataset grabbed has both fursonas and fan art in it. There are not many furries with fursonas that look like Judy, though I'm not sure why that would be gross. Fursonas tend to mirror the style the content one was watching when they were a kid, so once kids who grow up watching Zootopia become old enough to enter the fandom, then those individuals might bring in a 3D style, but it has yet to happen.
- ben_w 7y ago
  I was about to say I recognised Toriel [0] and was suspicious it might have been memorising a bit too much. As for the idea that furry are has too many similarities… I don’t think so. The variance in fursona body morphology is huge. For example, one thing I didn’t notice in this set was Sergals [1]. [0] Undertail. And no, not like that. [1] https://en.wikifur.com/wiki/Sergal https://en.wikifur.com/wiki/Sergal
  - some_furry 7y ago
    Undertale* though the typo makes sense given AI is on topic
    - ben_w 7y ago
      Now I feel stupid. :)
      - drdeca 7y ago
        Oh, I thought it was intentional, seeing as, uh, that spelling is used to refer to p*ographic fanworks of that work of fiction
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - gwern 7y ago
    Arfa excluded a few categories like ponies and scalies to keep it from being too broad for StyleGAN. Sergals would probably get excluded as part of that.
  - Kye 7y ago
    And protogens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiSs-sGclcU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiSs-sGclcU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HwdsjXEbOQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HwdsjXEbOQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGOFU62wVco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGOFU62wVco
    - 7y ago
- dTal 7y ago
  I saw a lot of verbatim copies of both the fox and the rabbit from Zootopia (possibly with shades of Disney's Robin Hood) and distinctive elements of Sonic the Hedgehog and Pokemon characters. I think it was trained on popular anthropomorphic media, not just furry art, and there's some overfitting. I don't think stylistic inspiration can quite explain its fondness for cheeky foxes wearing green. Zootopia: https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed18100.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed18100.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed73222.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed73222.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed46870.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed46870.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed88525.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed88525.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed16983.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed16983.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed38798.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed38798.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed34557.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed34557.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed20308.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed20308.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed65770.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed65770.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed13269.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed13269.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed31499.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed31499.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed78829.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed78829.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed02032.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed02032.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed24939.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed24939.jpg Pikachu: https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed12878.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed12878.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed05116.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed05116.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed49143.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed49143.jpg Sonic: https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed22797.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed22797.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed95651.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed95651.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed35704.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed35704.jpg
- knolax 7y ago
  I mean it could just be that us non-furries aren't attuned to the subtle differences and conventions of fursonas.
- mortenjorck 7y ago
  What’s most interesting to me vis-a-vis other GAN portrait generators is the range of illustration styles employed here. It’s like a GAN that generates both manga and western comic-art faces without any incongruous hybrids.
wjnc 7y ago
The furry fandom is a subculture interested in anthropomorphic animal characters with human personalities and characteristics. Examples of anthropomorphic attributes include exhibiting human intelligence and facial expressions, speaking, walking on two legs, and wearing clothes. The term "furry fandom" is also used to refer to the community of people who gather on the internet and at furry conventions. [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furry_fandom https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furry_fandom
- kayfox 7y ago
  One key differentiation for the furry fandom is that Furries usually have their own made up characters instead of other fandoms where roleplay/cosplay/avatars are typically of characters from media.
  - NikolaeVarius 7y ago
    Should be careful with calling them "made up characters". I know a significant percentage of furries where their fursona is considered a real second personality.
    - 2OEH8eoCRo0 7y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_identity_disorder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_identity_disorder >Dissociative identity disorder (DID), previously known as multiple personality disorder (MPD),[7] is a mental disorder characterized by the maintenance of at least two distinct and relatively enduring personality states. Why the downvotes?
      - saagarjha 7y ago
        Because you've brought up mental disorder in a discussion about furries.
        2OEH8eoCRo0 7y ago
logfromblammo 7y ago
This AI passes the Furing Test.
some_furry 7y ago
This is the coolest use of AI I've seen in a while! :3
djsumdog 7y ago
All I see are an infinite number of unique user avatars for every Mastodon/Pleroma/Misskey instance of the Fediverse.
dj_gitmo 7y ago
I assume that this would only work reliably for headshots/avatars? Still, if I were an artist whose income came from furry art, this would terrify me.
- some_furry 7y ago
  No, because a fursona is something that's deeply personal to the person, and typically the process for creating one looks like this: 1. Decide what you want to look like 2. Create a reference sheet (or commission an artist to create one based on a description from step 1) 3. Commission a headshot for an avatar 4. Commission some art of your fursona, possibly with your friends' fursonas 5. GOTO 4 6. At some point, your friends may ask you for your reference sheet so they can gift you an art piece of your fursona and theirs (see optional stage of 4) Even if you can churn out AI-generated headshots, getting the colors/markings just right for your character is nontrivial for non-generic fursonas (see https://soatok.com/static/soatok-johis-responsive.jpg https://soatok.com/static/soatok-johis-responsive.jpg for example). And besides, most art commissions are conducted after you have a reference sheet and/or headshot of your character. If anything, this will give artists something they can point the "steal other people's character art for their roleplay accounts" types of (especially younger) furries towards. "Can't afford to commission an artist? Just use the AI thing and stop the misbehavior!"
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- the8472 7y ago
  there has been some progress in the anime category: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1257683697777569792 https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1257683697777569792
  - Izkata 7y ago
    This one generates a character and a plot: https://www.thiswaifudoesnotexist.net/ https://www.thiswaifudoesnotexist.net/
kick 7y ago
Truly impressive results, though I find it unsettling that there's a decent chance that the future of all Internet aggregators is going to be "We threw data into computer and it threw out magic thing!"
- djsumdog 7y ago
  Just wait until AI create random cartoon shows and comedy that end up being funny. That will be uncanny.
  - proverbialbunny 7y ago
    That's been going on for a while now with young kids television on youtube. It's usually more CGI than cartoon though.
    - krapp 7y ago
      Is there any evidence those are actually AI generated, or just quickly cranked out by humans using templates and scripts? I tend to assume the latter, especially with any of the "Elsagate" style content.
      - proverbialbunny 7y ago
        That's a good point. I don't know if anyone has leaked any behind the scenes for those videos. Is there a name for a Reverse Turing Test? Because those videos pass it.
      - rideontime 7y ago
        As far as the Elsagate stuff goes, it's not that the videos themselves were algorithmically generated, but that their creators were driven by YouTube's algorithms to create the content that would generate the most views.
  - kick 7y ago
    I saw an AI 'meme generator' the other day that seemed to make fairly insightful and funny memes. I think the future is close, and...very strange.
nrr 7y ago
Thanks, I hate it. One of those interesting side-effects of furry avatars that I noticed is that accounts bearing those avatars were always real people, with the added bonus that you can generally authenticate the human behind the mask if you know how. The reality of being online today is that we have to understand whether we're interacting with real people or just a clever piece of software, and this is far more true for folks who are not technically savvy. Oddly enough, furries were the last bastion of humanity. (And a welcoming one at that, but I digress.) This complicates that heuristic somewhat. This brings furry avatars on the same level as human headshots. I now need to, e.g., read and process the full account bio and spend more time authenticating whom I interact with online. This is great work, but did you really have to?
- URSpider94 7y ago
  What?
  - some_furry 7y ago
    > What? What nrr is saying is simply: If someone replies to a comment and they have a human avatar, there was always a chance it was the output of https://www.thispersondoesnotexist.com https://www.thispersondoesnotexist.com Their heuristic for "if it's a furry avatar, it's probably not from a Russian troll farm" is now invalid.
    - URSpider94 7y ago
      Ok, thank you (and no offense meant to the OP) that makes sense in an odd way, and I’m clearly just not up on these things. I wasn’t aware that the corresponding fake-person generator was a thing, but of course it is. There’s something odd about the fact that a cartoon rendering would be more trustworthy than a photo. Then again, there’s always been the joke about people who keep the sample photo that comes in the picture frame to pretend they have a s.o. or family ...
  - derefr 7y ago
    If you look at the profile pictures on Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress, etc., they fall into a few categories: • fallback — e.g. the egg image on twitter • explicitly algorithmic — e.g. http://identicon.net/ http://identicon.net/ • logotypes — actual logos, icons, arbitrary aesthetically-pleasing typographical art • headshots of real people • photographs of real-life things — places, nature, buildings, etc. • crops from TV/film — headshots of actors playing characters, or whatever you'd call Baby Yoda • famous works of art — crops of prints of paintings, crops of photos of sculptures • commercially-marketable art — box art, movie posters, crops from cartoons/anime, professionally-commissioned CG paintings that fit the style of their source material • unknown, non-marketable art — works that are clearly either self-made, or commissioned as a one-off, where the work has traits that make it specific-enough to someone's tastes that it obviously would never have been produced as spec work without an arranged buyer/planned use The parent's point is that, for all the categories except the last, there's an obvious way to scrape or generate a million such images, that someone can include in their spambot/voting-ring registering algorithm. The last category, though—custom competent-but-not-commercial-looking illustrations—were, in some sense, a Proof of Work token for the profile it was attached to: someone had to draw that (and even more, gather requirements to draw that, rather than it just being one keyframe following the same rules of thousands of others.) It cost a few dollars for that person to get that image; and therefore, it's less likely (though not impossible) that ten users with ten different such illustrations in a forum thread were all secretly the same person/bot. There hasn't even been an AI that can do face-detection on funny-animal cartoons until now, AFAIK, so there was until now no way to even automate+scale scraping of "authentic" profile-pictures from some art-hosting website, let alone a way to automate+scale generating them. But now the cat's out of the bag. Bit of a shame.
modal-soul 7y ago
In this case, the incidental heterochromia actually makes it feel even more authentic.
- gwern 7y ago
  The heterochromia is probably not 'incidental'. Heterochromia, quite aside from lighting/shading differences in eye color, is present in many real images: Danbooru has a ton, and e621 has 11k images tagged 'heterochromia'. Just a common trope in illustrations.
teddyh 7y ago
Some of them are a bit weird, still. This one is odd; are those horns or spikes? And what’s that sticking out the back (or is that from the ear?): https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed30101.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed30101.jpg It’s always fun when these kind of systems try to generate text: https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed25387.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed25387.jpg And then we have this one, which is pretty clearly Toriel from Undertale: https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed14017.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed14017.jpg
- indrora 7y ago
  The training set is (naturally) skewed towards a handful of characters. I wrote about it on twitter when I saw this: https://twitter.com/indrora/status/1258094389013831680 https://twitter.com/indrora/status/1258094389013831680
noxer 7y ago
KILL IT! WITH FIRE! before it lays.... nvm none of them will reproduce
- some_furry 7y ago
  It's difficult to parse your comment as anything but homophobic, given what you said and the demographics of the furry fandom [1]. :\ [1] https://adjectivespecies.com/2015/08/24/furry-demographics/ https://adjectivespecies.com/2015/08/24/furry-demographics/
  - noxer 7y ago
    A non-existing human-animal-mixed creature can not reproduce because it does not exist. Also it was a reference to a meme https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/kill-it-before-it-lays-eggs https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/kill-it-before-it-lays-eggs if you don't get it move on.
  - HoppyHaus 7y ago
    It could also be a statement on furries being repulsive to the general populace
meddlepal 7y ago
Hah this is really neat and a fun use of AI.
CodeCube 7y ago
Has anyone ever made some variant of these "* does not exist" sites with some control sliders/options, that controls various aspects of what's generated? So things like: gender, hair color, face shape, etc? Basically, an AI-driven character generator that isn't completely random?
- gwern 7y ago
  Absolutely. Waifu Labs https://waifulabs.com/ https://waifulabs.com/ implements a grid-based choice system for evolving anime portraits, and Artbreeder https://artbreeder.com/ https://artbreeder.com/ implements controls plus crossbreeding and other features for a variety of StyleGAN/BigGAN models. There's plenty of scripts and Colab notebooks as well for various kinds of editing or control if Artbreeder doesn't do it for you. (I think Runway may also do editing but I haven't used them in ages.) GAN models do not need to be specifically architected to enable control, because you can reverse them to get the latents/seed and manipulate that to 'edit' images: https://www.gwern.net/Faces#reversing-stylegan-to-control-modify-images https://www.gwern.net/Faces#reversing-stylegan-to-control-mo... So if someone wanted, they could use Arfa's model to edit images.
  - CodeCube 7y ago
    This is incredible, thanks for sharing!
amelius 7y ago
This was expected from: - It was already possible to create fursonas based on pictures of human faces. - It was possible to generate pictures of faces of humans that do not exist. Pipe these two together and you get this ...
rideontime 7y ago
> As the images are generated by an AI, they are non-copyrightable and are therefore public domain. Feel free to use them any way you see fit. Just don't try to pass them off as your own art or sell them or anything. The furry fandom is extremely touchy about "art theft." Considering how many of these images clearly resemble individual artists' styles, I'd tread a little more carefully.
- lucasmullens 7y ago
  > As the images are generated by an AI, they are non-copyrightable and are therefore public domain. This part seems false. If I take copyrighted photos and run it through something like an "AI" filter to change the colors slightly, the photos aren't suddenly public domain. If you steal from enough people at once is it then legal?
  - gwern 7y ago
    > If I take copyrighted photos and run it through something like an "AI" filter to change the colors slightly, the photos aren't suddenly public domain. That is not what is being done here. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformativeness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformativeness > If you steal from enough people at once is it then legal? How many people does a great human artist steal from to become an artist? If you steal solely from one other artist, you're a plagiarist; if you steal from a thousand other artists, you're an innovator and pioneer of a new style...
    - fenwick67 7y ago
      This isn't transformative enough to pass a sniff test. They took multiple images and put them in a computer to make images that look like those images. What's transformative about that?
      - gwern 7y ago
        That's extremely transformative: it's learning from a large corpus what faces are and how to create brand new ones which cannot even be traced back to an original. (If you think even that is not enough to count as 'transformative', I suggest you look at the examples in the WP article of what has been considered transformative, like 'thumbnail screenshots of web pages' and 'putting a mustache on the Mona Lisa'.)
corysama 7y ago
Some of these have designs that are so... specific? holistic? Not sure what I'm shooting for. But, I am wondering if you ran an image similarity search on them vs. the training set would you find matches or are they actually unique? https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed09985.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed09985.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed13901.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed13901.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed31957.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed31957.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed25075.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed25075.jpg
- mintplant 7y ago
  I know a guy who was developing a reverse image search system in this niche. I'll pass this on to him.
  - duskwuff 7y ago
    There are a couple of broad-based "fan art" reverse image search engines out there. One pretty comprehensive one is https://saucenao.com/ https://saucenao.com/.
- GauntletWizard 7y ago
  I'm convinced that for 90% of these "Does not exist" generators, you can identify two or three hugely influential images, and almost all the rest is noise. There's an image where the hair comes from, an image for the facial structure, and then some perturbations are made to eye color or jawline. Not to say that isn't impressive! Generating convincing fakes, even 1% of the time, even if they're not super unique (There's plenty of people who "look exactly like" in the real world, too!) is a big deal.
  - gwern 7y ago
    That is obviously not true if you watch any interpolation videos or do any nearest-neighbor lookups.
- 7y ago
Jon_Lowtek 7y ago
> As the images are generated by an AI, they are non-copyrightable and are therefore public domain. I find this claim on the "about page" quite interesting. Some of those images might be so close to the training data that the copyright protection for fictional characters becomes relevant, even if the image is not identical. This is visible in this topic as people recognize characters from popular-culture (video-games or movies), because the training data seems to also contain fanart.
- BorisTheBrave 7y ago
  I suspect in legal terms, if you feed copyrighted images into a computer program, the output is a derivative work, AI or no. As you say, some of the output images are clearly of specific characters, which turns this from "legally grey" into "definitely not public domain".
  - klipt 7y ago
    Depends how creative the AI is. Human artists are trained on copyrighted images too.
    - lloeki 7y ago
      Good artists copy, great artists steal? This is the whole conundrum of creation and copyright. Every creative work is protected by copyright yet every creative work is the sum of unconscious derivations to varying degrees of something an author has perceived, creative works existing ex nihilo are at best vanishingly rare; personally I'm not even sure they exist, I'm leaning more towards we're just mistaking unusually big jumps of derivations/combinations of those for ex nihilo creative works. We readily recognise "influences" of great artists (whether it is music, literature, painting...). Doesn't mean creative work should not be protected, but drawing the line of infringing vs not is by definition extremely blurry and subjective. That talk is as relevant as ever: https://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_laws_that_choke_creativity https://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_laws_that_choke_cr...
- duxup 7y ago
tomphoolery 7y ago
This looks like a Zoom meeting with 4chan.
lokl 7y ago
I'd like to propose a "does not exist" site that does not exist: This Family Does Not Exist. Generate faces and a family tree, where I can see familial resemblance and where that resemblance follows our understanding of genetics. Related business: let me upload photos of my relatives and a family tree, and show me generated faces for other people on the family tree (e.g., common ancestors) based on these inputs and genetics. I wonder what kind of accuracy can be achieved in generating a person's face, based on how many descendants' faces we have photos of, over how many generations, with how much inbreeding, etc.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
kixiQu 7y ago
No horned animals? Discrimination!
- some_furry 7y ago
  That would violate the "no horny on main" rule
- lykr0n 7y ago
  Or scalies. They all seem to trend towards feminine cat/fox 'sonas. I guess it's a result of the data-set used.
  - duskwuff 7y ago
    > They all seem to trend towards feminine cat/fox 'sonas. The gender bias is actually really interesting. I'm curious how much of it is due to: * Inherent bias in the source dataset. (For example, nekomimi art is overwhelmingly female -- there's a reason they're referred to as "catgirls". The GAN does a great job of distinguishing this from Western anthropomorphic art styles, incidentally.) * Bias introduced through filtering of the dataset, e.g. by excluding NSFW source material or certain tags, or a bias in what types of faces were recognized. * Androgynous faces being interpreted as feminine by default. * GAN-specific characteristics of the output (like smooth features) being interpreted as feminine.
    - lykr0n 7y ago
      I think it's bais towards catgirls and other anthropomorphized anime characters which is skewing the results. If you go to FA, you would have to look hard to find feminine like this. It's either using a catgirls, as you say, heavy dataset or mixing two unrelated datasets. I don't like the word feminine, because it's not really what furry feminine is. It's a human-applied-to-furry concept. ACTUALLY. As I refresh the page, I get the feeling that it's the result of weird mixing between flat shaded art and mixing anthromorphic and "cargirls" (for lack of a better term- and I don't want to say east vs western, because catgirls dont' fall under furry)- anime inspired furry. It's weird, and makes me ponder. If the underlying datasets are a more similar art style and didn't have anime inspired art mixed in, I think the result would be less confusing and cooler. Still an awesome project.
andrewstuart 7y ago
I'd love to see this for spaceships.
Hickfang 7y ago
Going on most of the comments, is nearly everyone on this forum a weirdo?
- echelon 7y ago
  > Going on most of the comments, is nearly everyone on this forum a weirdo? Nearly everyone on HN has empathy, curiosity, and the ability to entertain other points of view.
- some_furry 7y ago
  What's wrong with being weird? https://faq.dhol.es/@Soatok/furry-fandom/being-weird-is-bad-though https://faq.dhol.es/@Soatok/furry-fandom/being-weird-is-bad-...
dilandau 7y ago
What the fuck makes this happen to people
whatsmyusername 7y ago
You were so caught up on whether you could. You never stopped to ask the question whether you should.
ducksick1 7y ago
Don't be disingenuous. You flagged him because you got called out on your furfaggotry.
alphachloride 7y ago
why
nootropicat 7y ago
The thumbnails have human-level quality. The full images have oddities, but they disappear when downsized. DL is going to put animators, voice actors and even actors out of work sooner than I ever expected. It's going to be feasible for one person to create a full anime episode in three days. The amount of content is going to explode by orders of magnitude and shared culture is basically going to die, with nearly zero chance another random person consumes the same content. What a weird time to live in.
- arpa 7y ago
  That's like saying snowclones and memes are going to kill book authors out of work... if anything, this is taking us to the next level of original work.
- avian 7y ago
  > The amount of content is going to explode by orders of magnitude and shared culture is basically going to die, with nearly zero chance another random person consumes the same content. Why? I believe there's already so much content out there that this could easily happen today if the only question would be the raw amount. However if you ask people around the water cooler, instead of one guy watching joesmith34's Source Film Maker video on YouTube and another watching janedoe157's flash animation yesterday evening, everyone watched the latest episode of a popular Netflix series.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
qqssccfftt 7y ago
> Girls are fetching fursonas. Please wait warmly Nice ref there.
philpem 7y ago
I can't wait for the first "your AI stole my original character!!!" furry thread on Twitter. Impressive achievement, I'd love to see the outcome of re-training it with fan-art removed from the training set. There's a lot of Nick Wilde and Judy Hopps in there...
- some_furry 7y ago
  Some furries were already having this discourse as soon as this hit HN.
arfafax 7y ago
Regarding "overfitting": I posted an interpolation video here -https://twitter.com/arfafax/status/1258344026706599937?s=20 https://twitter.com/arfafax/status/1258344026706599937?s=20 This demonstrates, at the very least, that it isn't simply memorizing the datapoints. You can see that it is able to smoothly transition between images of Zootopia characters and other characters, which indicates that it has learned a lot more about the actual features. I believe the prevalence of certain characters (Zootopia, Sonic characters, Pokemon) showing up is because a large portion of the input space maps to those regions of the latent space. So I'd expect there to be a roughly equal proportion of images that look like Nick Wilde in the random samples as there are in the training data.

207 points by arfafax 7y ago

This has far fewer oddities than the people based ones. Maybe that's because furry art all have similar qualities already, so it's easier? A few of them were just straight up Judy from Zootopia, so that says something gross about the furry community, I'm sure. Also, I hate this. I especially hate the loading messages.

dylz 7y ago
What does that say that's gross?
- Loughla 7y ago
  I'm learning about some of my personal biases through this, apparently. I just assume furries/fursonas/furry fandom/whatever it's called is about sex.
  - some_furry 7y ago
    > I just assume furries/fursonas/furry fandom/whatever it's called is about sex. Nope! :3 https://faq.dhol.es/@Soatok/furry-fandom/is-furry-a-sex-thing https://faq.dhol.es/@Soatok/furry-fandom/is-furry-a-sex-thin... It's a common misconception. We're more about community than anything. (That's not saying that sex doesn't happen between adults, but that's not what it's about, for everyone.)
  - Lammy 7y ago
    In my experience, any activity or community enjoyed by humans has a subgroup for “that thing, but also with sex”. It’s more of a reflection of what it means to be human than anything to do with the means of that expression.
  - GauntletWizard 7y ago
    It is mostly about sex. Most furries are spergy enough not to realize that the tingly feeling they get from the baby talk is a sexual pleasure, though.
    - rsynnott 7y ago
      This is a pretty weird assumption, especially when you extend it to, say, those people who do faux-medieval re-enactments. One can dress up and get in a character without it being about sex. Don't see the appeal myself, but "it's all about sex" is a weird leap.
      - GauntletWizard 7y ago
        Having been in a ren-faire and had friends in the SCA... Holy crap, have you picked a bad comparison, if you're trying to refute my point. Edit: To provide a bit more context: Mating dances in most bird species are not direct indicators of evolutionary fitness, but they are what is selected for. SCA events, Fursonas, and the like are the postmodern equivalent of mating dances. They are Conspicuous Consumption, Veblen-good displays of "I can spend my time doing this self-defining thing instead of productively". That's fine and dandy. I'm not judging people for making their mating dance some form of roleplay (because most any formal competition displays the same traits).
        rsynnott 7y ago
        ... That's about sex? I would have thought it would be very uncomfortable, with all the anachronistic chain mail and so on. Edit responding to you edit: Okay, based on that thesis pretty much everything, beyond the bare essentials of life, is about sex. Which doesn't really sound plausible.
        GauntletWizard 7y ago
        Life is about reproduction, yes. Nearly every non life-sustaining activity is about sex, and that's not even a thesis, that's an axiom. But very specifically: Furry conventions are about sex. The drunken orgy room parties are far better attended (And yes, I have seen hotel contracts that prove this) than the "main event". Nerd conventions are about sex. SCA events are about sex. They are not exclusively, but as social activities, one of their significant motivating factors is mate-shopping, and there is every indicator that the other advantages of social activity (collaboration and trust building, trading, etc) are not significant motivating factors. People don't get jobs from BDSM conventions (Actually, they do, and then those workplaces go under because hiring people because you're fucking them is dumb).
- blackearl 7y ago
  It doesn't need to be gross to dislike the weird baby talk "uwu" stuff. Although seeing it in much more technical contexts will make me laugh - https://github.com/mpaland/printf/issues/15 https://github.com/mpaland/printf/issues/15 - "Scawy big no functionality at all UwU #15"
  - cosmojg 7y ago
    Wow, that person seems to do this in all of the issues they file. They're also really good at filing issues despite the baby talk. All of their issues are well-researched and immediately actionable with a surprising amount of debugging completed before the initial submission.
    - Baeocystin 7y ago
      Devs tend to have a penchant for the absurd. The details may change along with the zeitgeist, but the personality quirk itself seems to be ubiquitous across the decades.
      - bluntfang 7y ago
        >Devs tend to have a penchant for the absurd. Ok this is just a stereotype that's not true.
        Baeocystin 7y ago
        :: notes reply comes from a commenter with a name that sounds like a fursona :: ...you're messing with me, aren't you. :D
        bluntfang 7y ago
        not really sure what you mean, can you elaborate on why you would say that? FWIW, I've met more normies in my 10years of software development than absurd people. Absurd people are just memorable, it's a bias. If you're actually curious, this username was stolen from an absurd Atlanta based rapper named blunt fang and I get more weed culture association than furry association with it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDal4GCyEJA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDal4GCyEJA
proverbialbunny 7y ago
The dataset grabbed has both fursonas and fan art in it. There are not many furries with fursonas that look like Judy, though I'm not sure why that would be gross. Fursonas tend to mirror the style the content one was watching when they were a kid, so once kids who grow up watching Zootopia become old enough to enter the fandom, then those individuals might bring in a 3D style, but it has yet to happen.
ben_w 7y ago
I was about to say I recognised Toriel [0] and was suspicious it might have been memorising a bit too much. As for the idea that furry are has too many similarities… I don’t think so. The variance in fursona body morphology is huge. For example, one thing I didn’t notice in this set was Sergals [1]. [0] Undertail. And no, not like that. [1] https://en.wikifur.com/wiki/Sergal https://en.wikifur.com/wiki/Sergal
- some_furry 7y ago
  Undertale* though the typo makes sense given AI is on topic
  - ben_w 7y ago
    Now I feel stupid. :)
    - drdeca 7y ago
      Oh, I thought it was intentional, seeing as, uh, that spelling is used to refer to p*ographic fanworks of that work of fiction
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- gwern 7y ago
  Arfa excluded a few categories like ponies and scalies to keep it from being too broad for StyleGAN. Sergals would probably get excluded as part of that.
- Kye 7y ago
  And protogens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiSs-sGclcU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiSs-sGclcU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HwdsjXEbOQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HwdsjXEbOQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGOFU62wVco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGOFU62wVco
  - 7y ago
dTal 7y ago
I saw a lot of verbatim copies of both the fox and the rabbit from Zootopia (possibly with shades of Disney's Robin Hood) and distinctive elements of Sonic the Hedgehog and Pokemon characters. I think it was trained on popular anthropomorphic media, not just furry art, and there's some overfitting. I don't think stylistic inspiration can quite explain its fondness for cheeky foxes wearing green. Zootopia: https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed18100.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed18100.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed73222.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed73222.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed46870.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed46870.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed88525.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed88525.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed16983.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed16983.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed38798.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed38798.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed34557.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed34557.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed20308.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed20308.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed65770.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed65770.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed13269.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed13269.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed31499.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed31499.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed78829.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed78829.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed02032.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed02032.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed24939.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed24939.jpg Pikachu: https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed12878.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed12878.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed05116.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed05116.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed49143.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed49143.jpg Sonic: https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed22797.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed22797.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed95651.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed95651.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed35704.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed35704.jpg
knolax 7y ago
I mean it could just be that us non-furries aren't attuned to the subtle differences and conventions of fursonas.
mortenjorck 7y ago
What’s most interesting to me vis-a-vis other GAN portrait generators is the range of illustration styles employed here. It’s like a GAN that generates both manga and western comic-art faces without any incongruous hybrids.

wjnc 7y ago

The furry fandom is a subculture interested in anthropomorphic animal characters with human personalities and characteristics. Examples of anthropomorphic attributes include exhibiting human intelligence and facial expressions, speaking, walking on two legs, and wearing clothes. The term "furry fandom" is also used to refer to the community of people who gather on the internet and at furry conventions. [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furry_fandom https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furry_fandom

kayfox 7y ago
One key differentiation for the furry fandom is that Furries usually have their own made up characters instead of other fandoms where roleplay/cosplay/avatars are typically of characters from media.
- NikolaeVarius 7y ago
  Should be careful with calling them "made up characters". I know a significant percentage of furries where their fursona is considered a real second personality.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_identity_disorder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_identity_disorder >Dissociative identity disorder (DID), previously known as multiple personality disorder (MPD),[7] is a mental disorder characterized by the maintenance of at least two distinct and relatively enduring personality states. Why the downvotes?
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      Because you've brought up mental disorder in a discussion about furries.
      - 2OEH8eoCRo0 7y ago

logfromblammo 7y ago

This AI passes the Furing Test.

some_furry 7y ago

This is the coolest use of AI I've seen in a while! :3

djsumdog 7y ago

All I see are an infinite number of unique user avatars for every Mastodon/Pleroma/Misskey instance of the Fediverse.

dj_gitmo 7y ago

I assume that this would only work reliably for headshots/avatars? Still, if I were an artist whose income came from furry art, this would terrify me.

some_furry 7y ago
No, because a fursona is something that's deeply personal to the person, and typically the process for creating one looks like this: 1. Decide what you want to look like 2. Create a reference sheet (or commission an artist to create one based on a description from step 1) 3. Commission a headshot for an avatar 4. Commission some art of your fursona, possibly with your friends' fursonas 5. GOTO 4 6. At some point, your friends may ask you for your reference sheet so they can gift you an art piece of your fursona and theirs (see optional stage of 4) Even if you can churn out AI-generated headshots, getting the colors/markings just right for your character is nontrivial for non-generic fursonas (see https://soatok.com/static/soatok-johis-responsive.jpg https://soatok.com/static/soatok-johis-responsive.jpg for example). And besides, most art commissions are conducted after you have a reference sheet and/or headshot of your character. If anything, this will give artists something they can point the "steal other people's character art for their roleplay accounts" types of (especially younger) furries towards. "Can't afford to commission an artist? Just use the AI thing and stop the misbehavior!"
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
the8472 7y ago
there has been some progress in the anime category: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1257683697777569792 https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1257683697777569792
- Izkata 7y ago
  This one generates a character and a plot: https://www.thiswaifudoesnotexist.net/ https://www.thiswaifudoesnotexist.net/

kick 7y ago

Truly impressive results, though I find it unsettling that there's a decent chance that the future of all Internet aggregators is going to be "We threw data into computer and it threw out magic thing!"

djsumdog 7y ago
Just wait until AI create random cartoon shows and comedy that end up being funny. That will be uncanny.
- proverbialbunny 7y ago
  That's been going on for a while now with young kids television on youtube. It's usually more CGI than cartoon though.
  - krapp 7y ago
    Is there any evidence those are actually AI generated, or just quickly cranked out by humans using templates and scripts? I tend to assume the latter, especially with any of the "Elsagate" style content.
    - proverbialbunny 7y ago
      That's a good point. I don't know if anyone has leaked any behind the scenes for those videos. Is there a name for a Reverse Turing Test? Because those videos pass it.
    - rideontime 7y ago
      As far as the Elsagate stuff goes, it's not that the videos themselves were algorithmically generated, but that their creators were driven by YouTube's algorithms to create the content that would generate the most views.
- kick 7y ago
  I saw an AI 'meme generator' the other day that seemed to make fairly insightful and funny memes. I think the future is close, and...very strange.

nrr 7y ago

Thanks, I hate it. One of those interesting side-effects of furry avatars that I noticed is that accounts bearing those avatars were always real people, with the added bonus that you can generally authenticate the human behind the mask if you know how. The reality of being online today is that we have to understand whether we're interacting with real people or just a clever piece of software, and this is far more true for folks who are not technically savvy. Oddly enough, furries were the last bastion of humanity. (And a welcoming one at that, but I digress.) This complicates that heuristic somewhat. This brings furry avatars on the same level as human headshots. I now need to, e.g., read and process the full account bio and spend more time authenticating whom I interact with online. This is great work, but did you really have to?

URSpider94 7y ago
What?
- some_furry 7y ago
  > What? What nrr is saying is simply: If someone replies to a comment and they have a human avatar, there was always a chance it was the output of https://www.thispersondoesnotexist.com https://www.thispersondoesnotexist.com Their heuristic for "if it's a furry avatar, it's probably not from a Russian troll farm" is now invalid.
  - URSpider94 7y ago
    Ok, thank you (and no offense meant to the OP) that makes sense in an odd way, and I’m clearly just not up on these things. I wasn’t aware that the corresponding fake-person generator was a thing, but of course it is. There’s something odd about the fact that a cartoon rendering would be more trustworthy than a photo. Then again, there’s always been the joke about people who keep the sample photo that comes in the picture frame to pretend they have a s.o. or family ...
- derefr 7y ago
  If you look at the profile pictures on Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress, etc., they fall into a few categories: • fallback — e.g. the egg image on twitter • explicitly algorithmic — e.g. http://identicon.net/ http://identicon.net/ • logotypes — actual logos, icons, arbitrary aesthetically-pleasing typographical art • headshots of real people • photographs of real-life things — places, nature, buildings, etc. • crops from TV/film — headshots of actors playing characters, or whatever you'd call Baby Yoda • famous works of art — crops of prints of paintings, crops of photos of sculptures • commercially-marketable art — box art, movie posters, crops from cartoons/anime, professionally-commissioned CG paintings that fit the style of their source material • unknown, non-marketable art — works that are clearly either self-made, or commissioned as a one-off, where the work has traits that make it specific-enough to someone's tastes that it obviously would never have been produced as spec work without an arranged buyer/planned use The parent's point is that, for all the categories except the last, there's an obvious way to scrape or generate a million such images, that someone can include in their spambot/voting-ring registering algorithm. The last category, though—custom competent-but-not-commercial-looking illustrations—were, in some sense, a Proof of Work token for the profile it was attached to: someone had to draw that (and even more, gather requirements to draw that, rather than it just being one keyframe following the same rules of thousands of others.) It cost a few dollars for that person to get that image; and therefore, it's less likely (though not impossible) that ten users with ten different such illustrations in a forum thread were all secretly the same person/bot. There hasn't even been an AI that can do face-detection on funny-animal cartoons until now, AFAIK, so there was until now no way to even automate+scale scraping of "authentic" profile-pictures from some art-hosting website, let alone a way to automate+scale generating them. But now the cat's out of the bag. Bit of a shame.

modal-soul 7y ago

In this case, the incidental heterochromia actually makes it feel even more authentic.

gwern 7y ago
The heterochromia is probably not 'incidental'. Heterochromia, quite aside from lighting/shading differences in eye color, is present in many real images: Danbooru has a ton, and e621 has 11k images tagged 'heterochromia'. Just a common trope in illustrations.

teddyh 7y ago

Some of them are a bit weird, still. This one is odd; are those horns or spikes? And what’s that sticking out the back (or is that from the ear?): https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed30101.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed30101.jpg It’s always fun when these kind of systems try to generate text: https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed25387.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed25387.jpg And then we have this one, which is pretty clearly Toriel from Undertale: https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed14017.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed14017.jpg

indrora 7y ago
The training set is (naturally) skewed towards a handful of characters. I wrote about it on twitter when I saw this: https://twitter.com/indrora/status/1258094389013831680 https://twitter.com/indrora/status/1258094389013831680

noxer 7y ago

KILL IT! WITH FIRE! before it lays.... nvm none of them will reproduce

some_furry 7y ago
It's difficult to parse your comment as anything but homophobic, given what you said and the demographics of the furry fandom [1]. :\ [1] https://adjectivespecies.com/2015/08/24/furry-demographics/ https://adjectivespecies.com/2015/08/24/furry-demographics/
- noxer 7y ago
  A non-existing human-animal-mixed creature can not reproduce because it does not exist. Also it was a reference to a meme https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/kill-it-before-it-lays-eggs https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/kill-it-before-it-lays-eggs if you don't get it move on.
- HoppyHaus 7y ago
  It could also be a statement on furries being repulsive to the general populace

meddlepal 7y ago

Hah this is really neat and a fun use of AI.

CodeCube 7y ago

Has anyone ever made some variant of these "* does not exist" sites with some control sliders/options, that controls various aspects of what's generated? So things like: gender, hair color, face shape, etc? Basically, an AI-driven character generator that isn't completely random?

gwern 7y ago
Absolutely. Waifu Labs https://waifulabs.com/ https://waifulabs.com/ implements a grid-based choice system for evolving anime portraits, and Artbreeder https://artbreeder.com/ https://artbreeder.com/ implements controls plus crossbreeding and other features for a variety of StyleGAN/BigGAN models. There's plenty of scripts and Colab notebooks as well for various kinds of editing or control if Artbreeder doesn't do it for you. (I think Runway may also do editing but I haven't used them in ages.) GAN models do not need to be specifically architected to enable control, because you can reverse them to get the latents/seed and manipulate that to 'edit' images: https://www.gwern.net/Faces#reversing-stylegan-to-control-modify-images https://www.gwern.net/Faces#reversing-stylegan-to-control-mo... So if someone wanted, they could use Arfa's model to edit images.
- CodeCube 7y ago
  This is incredible, thanks for sharing!

amelius 7y ago

This was expected from: - It was already possible to create fursonas based on pictures of human faces. - It was possible to generate pictures of faces of humans that do not exist. Pipe these two together and you get this ...

rideontime 7y ago

> As the images are generated by an AI, they are non-copyrightable and are therefore public domain. Feel free to use them any way you see fit. Just don't try to pass them off as your own art or sell them or anything. The furry fandom is extremely touchy about "art theft." Considering how many of these images clearly resemble individual artists' styles, I'd tread a little more carefully.

lucasmullens 7y ago
> As the images are generated by an AI, they are non-copyrightable and are therefore public domain. This part seems false. If I take copyrighted photos and run it through something like an "AI" filter to change the colors slightly, the photos aren't suddenly public domain. If you steal from enough people at once is it then legal?
- gwern 7y ago
  > If I take copyrighted photos and run it through something like an "AI" filter to change the colors slightly, the photos aren't suddenly public domain. That is not what is being done here. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformativeness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformativeness > If you steal from enough people at once is it then legal? How many people does a great human artist steal from to become an artist? If you steal solely from one other artist, you're a plagiarist; if you steal from a thousand other artists, you're an innovator and pioneer of a new style...
  - fenwick67 7y ago
    This isn't transformative enough to pass a sniff test. They took multiple images and put them in a computer to make images that look like those images. What's transformative about that?
    - gwern 7y ago
      That's extremely transformative: it's learning from a large corpus what faces are and how to create brand new ones which cannot even be traced back to an original. (If you think even that is not enough to count as 'transformative', I suggest you look at the examples in the WP article of what has been considered transformative, like 'thumbnail screenshots of web pages' and 'putting a mustache on the Mona Lisa'.)

corysama 7y ago

Some of these have designs that are so... specific? holistic? Not sure what I'm shooting for. But, I am wondering if you ran an image similarity search on them vs. the training set would you find matches or are they actually unique? https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed09985.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed09985.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed13901.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed13901.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed31957.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed31957.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed25075.jpg https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/v2/jpgs-2x/seed25075.jpg

mintplant 7y ago
I know a guy who was developing a reverse image search system in this niche. I'll pass this on to him.
- duskwuff 7y ago
  There are a couple of broad-based "fan art" reverse image search engines out there. One pretty comprehensive one is https://saucenao.com/ https://saucenao.com/.
GauntletWizard 7y ago
I'm convinced that for 90% of these "Does not exist" generators, you can identify two or three hugely influential images, and almost all the rest is noise. There's an image where the hair comes from, an image for the facial structure, and then some perturbations are made to eye color or jawline. Not to say that isn't impressive! Generating convincing fakes, even 1% of the time, even if they're not super unique (There's plenty of people who "look exactly like" in the real world, too!) is a big deal.
- gwern 7y ago
  That is obviously not true if you watch any interpolation videos or do any nearest-neighbor lookups.
7y ago

Jon_Lowtek 7y ago

> As the images are generated by an AI, they are non-copyrightable and are therefore public domain. I find this claim on the "about page" quite interesting. Some of those images might be so close to the training data that the copyright protection for fictional characters becomes relevant, even if the image is not identical. This is visible in this topic as people recognize characters from popular-culture (video-games or movies), because the training data seems to also contain fanart.

BorisTheBrave 7y ago
I suspect in legal terms, if you feed copyrighted images into a computer program, the output is a derivative work, AI or no. As you say, some of the output images are clearly of specific characters, which turns this from "legally grey" into "definitely not public domain".
- klipt 7y ago
  Depends how creative the AI is. Human artists are trained on copyrighted images too.
  - lloeki 7y ago
    Good artists copy, great artists steal? This is the whole conundrum of creation and copyright. Every creative work is protected by copyright yet every creative work is the sum of unconscious derivations to varying degrees of something an author has perceived, creative works existing ex nihilo are at best vanishingly rare; personally I'm not even sure they exist, I'm leaning more towards we're just mistaking unusually big jumps of derivations/combinations of those for ex nihilo creative works. We readily recognise "influences" of great artists (whether it is music, literature, painting...). Doesn't mean creative work should not be protected, but drawing the line of infringing vs not is by definition extremely blurry and subjective. That talk is as relevant as ever: https://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_laws_that_choke_creativity https://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_laws_that_choke_cr...
duxup 7y ago

tomphoolery 7y ago

This looks like a Zoom meeting with 4chan.

lokl 7y ago

I'd like to propose a "does not exist" site that does not exist: This Family Does Not Exist. Generate faces and a family tree, where I can see familial resemblance and where that resemblance follows our understanding of genetics. Related business: let me upload photos of my relatives and a family tree, and show me generated faces for other people on the family tree (e.g., common ancestors) based on these inputs and genetics. I wonder what kind of accuracy can be achieved in generating a person's face, based on how many descendants' faces we have photos of, over how many generations, with how much inbreeding, etc.

deleted 7y ago

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kixiQu 7y ago

No horned animals? Discrimination!

some_furry 7y ago
That would violate the "no horny on main" rule
lykr0n 7y ago
Or scalies. They all seem to trend towards feminine cat/fox 'sonas. I guess it's a result of the data-set used.
- duskwuff 7y ago
  > They all seem to trend towards feminine cat/fox 'sonas. The gender bias is actually really interesting. I'm curious how much of it is due to: * Inherent bias in the source dataset. (For example, nekomimi art is overwhelmingly female -- there's a reason they're referred to as "catgirls". The GAN does a great job of distinguishing this from Western anthropomorphic art styles, incidentally.) * Bias introduced through filtering of the dataset, e.g. by excluding NSFW source material or certain tags, or a bias in what types of faces were recognized. * Androgynous faces being interpreted as feminine by default. * GAN-specific characteristics of the output (like smooth features) being interpreted as feminine.
  - lykr0n 7y ago
    I think it's bais towards catgirls and other anthropomorphized anime characters which is skewing the results. If you go to FA, you would have to look hard to find feminine like this. It's either using a catgirls, as you say, heavy dataset or mixing two unrelated datasets. I don't like the word feminine, because it's not really what furry feminine is. It's a human-applied-to-furry concept. ACTUALLY. As I refresh the page, I get the feeling that it's the result of weird mixing between flat shaded art and mixing anthromorphic and "cargirls" (for lack of a better term- and I don't want to say east vs western, because catgirls dont' fall under furry)- anime inspired furry. It's weird, and makes me ponder. If the underlying datasets are a more similar art style and didn't have anime inspired art mixed in, I think the result would be less confusing and cooler. Still an awesome project.

andrewstuart 7y ago

I'd love to see this for spaceships.

Hickfang 7y ago

Going on most of the comments, is nearly everyone on this forum a weirdo?

echelon 7y ago
> Going on most of the comments, is nearly everyone on this forum a weirdo? Nearly everyone on HN has empathy, curiosity, and the ability to entertain other points of view.
some_furry 7y ago
What's wrong with being weird? https://faq.dhol.es/@Soatok/furry-fandom/being-weird-is-bad-though https://faq.dhol.es/@Soatok/furry-fandom/being-weird-is-bad-...

dilandau 7y ago

What the fuck makes this happen to people

whatsmyusername 7y ago

You were so caught up on whether you could. You never stopped to ask the question whether you should.

ducksick1 7y ago

Don't be disingenuous. You flagged him because you got called out on your furfaggotry.

alphachloride 7y ago

why

nootropicat 7y ago

The thumbnails have human-level quality. The full images have oddities, but they disappear when downsized. DL is going to put animators, voice actors and even actors out of work sooner than I ever expected. It's going to be feasible for one person to create a full anime episode in three days. The amount of content is going to explode by orders of magnitude and shared culture is basically going to die, with nearly zero chance another random person consumes the same content. What a weird time to live in.

arpa 7y ago
That's like saying snowclones and memes are going to kill book authors out of work... if anything, this is taking us to the next level of original work.
avian 7y ago
> The amount of content is going to explode by orders of magnitude and shared culture is basically going to die, with nearly zero chance another random person consumes the same content. Why? I believe there's already so much content out there that this could easily happen today if the only question would be the raw amount. However if you ask people around the water cooler, instead of one guy watching joesmith34's Source Film Maker video on YouTube and another watching janedoe157's flash animation yesterday evening, everyone watched the latest episode of a popular Netflix series.
deleted 7y ago
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qqssccfftt 7y ago

> Girls are fetching fursonas. Please wait warmly Nice ref there.

philpem 7y ago

I can't wait for the first "your AI stole my original character!!!" furry thread on Twitter. Impressive achievement, I'd love to see the outcome of re-training it with fan-art removed from the training set. There's a lot of Nick Wilde and Judy Hopps in there...

some_furry 7y ago
Some furries were already having this discourse as soon as this hit HN.

arfafax 7y ago

Regarding "overfitting": I posted an interpolation video here -https://twitter.com/arfafax/status/1258344026706599937?s=20 https://twitter.com/arfafax/status/1258344026706599937?s=20 This demonstrates, at the very least, that it isn't simply memorizing the datapoints. You can see that it is able to smoothly transition between images of Zootopia characters and other characters, which indicates that it has learned a lot more about the actual features. I believe the prevalence of certain characters (Zootopia, Sonic characters, Pokemon) showing up is because a large portion of the input space maps to those regions of the latent space. So I'd expect there to be a roughly equal proportion of images that look like Nick Wilde in the random samples as there are in the training data.