4 ms·

What?

some_furry 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Izkata 6y ago
  > so there was until now no way to even automate+scale scraping of "authentic" profile-pictures from some art-hosting website There's a few furry-oriented art websites, so this part has actually been really easy for like two decades.
  - derefr 6y ago
    "Automate and scale" means something other than what you think it means. The scraping of relevant raw images is the easy part. But you can't use scraped images as profile pictures directly, without first cropping them to be headshot-ish, because slapping random raw images with no sense of photographic composition into your profile picture is also a common signal of there not being a human in the loop. And human labor—even the cheapest human labor—still costs way too much to have real people sitting there cropping pictures to use as profile pictures, if you need a basically-infinite stream of them for your spambot network. So you'd need, at minimum, a face-detection algorithm that you can rely on to do auto-cropping, so that you can just throw it a whole scrape-dump of the art site, and get back that basically-infinite stream of headshots. As I said, until this very project, there was no face-detection algorithm that worked on illustrations of, er, "demihuman" faces. (There was one for humans, that would fail horribly on this data; and then specific other ones for cats/dogs/etc in photos, that also would fail here.)

What?

> 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 6y 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 6y 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.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Izkata 6y ago
> so there was until now no way to even automate+scale scraping of "authentic" profile-pictures from some art-hosting website There's a few furry-oriented art websites, so this part has actually been really easy for like two decades.
- derefr 6y ago
  "Automate and scale" means something other than what you think it means. The scraping of relevant raw images is the easy part. But you can't use scraped images as profile pictures directly, without first cropping them to be headshot-ish, because slapping random raw images with no sense of photographic composition into your profile picture is also a common signal of there not being a human in the loop. And human labor—even the cheapest human labor—still costs way too much to have real people sitting there cropping pictures to use as profile pictures, if you need a basically-infinite stream of them for your spambot network. So you'd need, at minimum, a face-detection algorithm that you can rely on to do auto-cropping, so that you can just throw it a whole scrape-dump of the art site, and get back that basically-infinite stream of headshots. As I said, until this very project, there was no face-detection algorithm that worked on illustrations of, er, "demihuman" faces. (There was one for humans, that would fail horribly on this data; and then specific other ones for cats/dogs/etc in photos, that also would fail here.)