7 ms·

AI learns from brain signals to create personalized attractive faces

103 points by erichocean 6y ago

booleandilemma 6y ago
I’m reminded of that scene in Snow Crash where this company’s holographic secretary has a different racial appearance depending on who’s talking to her. (I read it awhile ago and forget the details)
- matthewdgreen 6y ago
  Or even more of a fit, there is a scene in Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" where a character meets a person while wearing AR/VR goggles as part of a piece of performance art. An algorithm gradually tweaks the performer's appearance by measuring his brain activity until the performer seems dazzlingly attractive. It sounds almost exactly like the technology being described here, to the point where I wonder if one of the authors read that novel.
  - bitwize 6y ago
    Idoru. Rei Toei looks different to everyone watching her.
  - pronoiac 6y ago
    I think it was a Rudy Rucker book, but I could be misremembering.
NoPicklez 6y ago
I've wondered for a long time that with facial recognition and ML, how we could better find matches for people firstly based on appearance then by other traits like personality. Could we use these personalised attractive faces and match people who have similar preferred facial features? Thus with a high level of certainty be able to predict if two people would be attracted to one another. Or understanding if beauty really is in the eye of the beholder, or if large groups of people with similar facial features are attracted to other groups with different but similar facial features.
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  Despite the high probability of it leading to some weird dystopia, I suspect some government will try implementing a national ML-powered dating service at some point (especially if birth rates continue to drop in developed countries). Two examples of governments getting involved in the dating market are from Japan[0] and Iran[1]. [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/japanese-government-dating-services-2016-10?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/japanese-government-dating-s... [1] https://www.datingsitesreviews.com/article.php?story=iran-launches-state-run-dating-website https://www.datingsitesreviews.com/article.php?story=iran-la...
  - thoughtstheseus 6y ago
    It would be easier to just pay people to have kids and make it an economic gain....
    - sunsetMurk 6y ago
      Imagine the two together.
    - skocznymroczny 6y ago
      It's not that simple. Many countries pay people to have kids, and it doesn't translate to increased birthrates as easily.
      - thoughtstheseus 6y ago
        I would enjoy learning more about these countries. It’s likely not enough of an economic gain.
  - twic 6y ago
    Singapore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Development_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Development_Network
klmadfejno 6y ago
If I'm reading this correctly, they showed a series of pictures, one at a time, and told people to focus on faces that they found attractive. They then recorded EEG data to generate a score of perceived attractiveness, and used it to influence the GAN to make more beautiful faces. This is a very weird approach. If the goal is to personalize attractive faces, you could just have subjects rate pictures on a scale of 1-100. If you want to test EEG ratings of attractiveness, you should just compare manual ratings to EEG ratings without prompting them to focus on attractive faces. In all likelihood, the EEG has no idea if you think a particular face is attractive. They've just trained the AI to recognize when a user is focusing intently vs. not. Which is still kind of cool, but much less interesting than the headline suggests.
- meowface 6y ago
  >If you want to test EEG ratings of attractiveness, you should just compare manual ratings to EEG ratings without prompting them to focus on attractive faces. Yeah, as you say, it'd be very interesting if it could first associate self-reports of attractiveness with EEG activity, and then know roughly how attractive you consider someone based solely on blind EEG data. Then reverse the process by generating lots of faces and picking the one that someone seems to be most attracted to purely based on their EEG. (This is what I initially thought the study would be doing.) I suspect there would be major challenges with this, though. Besides EEG data possibly being too coarse, it's possible that what happens in the brain when you see someone you find attractive is very complicated and multifaceted. I think "attractiveness" may not be a single metric along a gradient even for a single individual's brain, let alone among a population. So even training on each person individually might not be that fruitful. For example, you may find two different people attractive due to a mix of reasons - some shared reasons, and some differing reasons. I'd guess the brain activity might differ in some ways in those cases. Maybe also even while looking at different photos of the same person, or even the same photo at different times. I know people tend to go through hormone cycles throughout the day; it's possible activity (as well as subjective attractiveness perception at a given time) may differ depending on what phase of a cycle you're in, or food, coffee, or alcohol you've had recently, etc. But who knows, maybe there often is some consistent pattern of activity which would serve as a decent proxy for overall attractiveness perception, if it could just be sifted out of the noise. This is probably just extremely difficult to do with current technology and neuroscience understanding, even if it may be feasible in theory. I'm sure we'll see more things like that in the coming decades.
bitwize 6y ago
Every copy of This Person Does Not Exist is personalized.
tablespoon 6y ago
Reminds me of this fantastic comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25418657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25418657: > You only started trying it out once they moved to GANS and VR headsets. You are not pathetic or anything, could get a real girl if you wanted to. Just don't have time. Have to focus on your career for now. "Build your empire then build your family", that's your motto. > You strap on the headset and see an adversarial generated girlfriend designed by world-class ML to maximize engagement. > She starts off as a generically beautiful young women; over the course of weeks she gradually molds both her appearance and your preferences such that competing products just won't do. > In her final form, she is just a grotesque undulating array of psychedelic colors perfectly optimized to introduce self-limiting microseizures in the pleasure center of the your brain. Were someone else to put on the headset, they would see only a nauseating mess. But to your eyes there is only Her. > It strikes you that true love does exist after all.
- meowface 6y ago
  Very insightful vision of a (proto-?)wireheading future. I suspect something similar to this may eventually be developed for AI-generated music, too. A kind of superstimulus or wirehead music that initially sounds strange and unintelligible but soon proves to be more pleasurable than anything you've ever heard before. Maybe even trained on and tailored to each individual's brain, to maximize pleasure and reward peaks. Perhaps with a little bit of optional user input, like sliders for fast, slow, bright, dark, intense, soft, "dopaminergically flat vs. spiky", etc.
  - twic 6y ago
    Maybe that's what vaporwave already is.
- m463 6y ago
  > Were someone else to put on the headset, they would see only a nauseating mess. I imagine that would define hot mess.
- Chris2048 6y ago
  > undulating array of psychedelic colors perfectly optimized to introduce self-limiting microseizures in the pleasure center of the your brain Is there any science behind this being possible? I would have thought morphing blob of porn-shapes would be more realistic.
DubiousPusher 6y ago
> Eighty-seven percent of the time, the individual selected the new faces as being AMONGST the most attractive Anyone read the actual study to see what this means. Seems like an opening for some fudging.
apengwin 6y ago
So affirming to see my portrait in the paper!
_Microft 6y ago
"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should", Ian Malcolm, Jurrasic Park This reminds me of a comment someone posted recently here. A situation was described that started with a virtual agent that was generally considered beautiful which was then optimized into a amorphous shape of colours that was the most attractive for this particular user. Edit: user "tablespoon" mentioned the same comment already, go check theirs for a link.
gaudat 6y ago
What if I am not attracted to the faces generated by the GAN? Say what if I prefer a different style, or even a drawing instead of an imitation of a real person? Can I hallucinate my own waifu with this?
zuminator 6y ago
It’s not far-fetched to imagine that by the end of the decade, a fair percentage of people’s Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok feeds will be generated characters based on their preferences as learned by the network. Engagement will be maximized because you’ll never be “all caught up.” There will always be a completely brand new image created on the fly available to capture your attention.
- a_imho 6y ago
  It is absolutely far fetched as far as I'm concerned. To me it is more plausible the new generation will not even care about insta/snapchat/tiktok. Do people still care about snapchat? Not sure about magic AI generated disposable entertainment either. I don't see it as feasible and even if it was, people would soon learn to filter it just like we filter spam and ads.
- luplex 6y ago
  I expect that today's social media paradigm will be recognized as harmful, just like Fast Food and Porn. Sure, sometimes you want to get that fix, but at that point its long-term utility will have degraded to nothing, so it's not something people will want to be addicted to.
numpad0 6y ago
Reminds me of recent "Let's draw porn using GA[1]" 1: (NSFW)https://gamingchahan.com/ecchi/ https://gamingchahan.com/ecchi/
LockAndLol 6y ago
I have a feeling this will be used in the future to select candidates for something like a job, beauty pageant, or simply for a " beauty ranking". The latter will probably be how they get test data (if they don't buy it from Facebook)
Gregam3 6y ago
Just another step towards the creation of our digital animas
rickdangerous1 6y ago
this coupled with deep fakes... could make things go really wrong in our societies. Demographic collapse inbound in 3,2,1.

103 points by erichocean 6y ago

I’m reminded of that scene in Snow Crash where this company’s holographic secretary has a different racial appearance depending on who’s talking to her. (I read it awhile ago and forget the details)

matthewdgreen 6y ago
Or even more of a fit, there is a scene in Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" where a character meets a person while wearing AR/VR goggles as part of a piece of performance art. An algorithm gradually tweaks the performer's appearance by measuring his brain activity until the performer seems dazzlingly attractive. It sounds almost exactly like the technology being described here, to the point where I wonder if one of the authors read that novel.
- bitwize 6y ago
  Idoru. Rei Toei looks different to everyone watching her.
- pronoiac 6y ago
  I think it was a Rudy Rucker book, but I could be misremembering.

NoPicklez 6y ago

I've wondered for a long time that with facial recognition and ML, how we could better find matches for people firstly based on appearance then by other traits like personality. Could we use these personalised attractive faces and match people who have similar preferred facial features? Thus with a high level of certainty be able to predict if two people would be attracted to one another. Or understanding if beauty really is in the eye of the beholder, or if large groups of people with similar facial features are attracted to other groups with different but similar facial features.

dane-pgp 6y ago
Despite the high probability of it leading to some weird dystopia, I suspect some government will try implementing a national ML-powered dating service at some point (especially if birth rates continue to drop in developed countries). Two examples of governments getting involved in the dating market are from Japan[0] and Iran[1]. [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/japanese-government-dating-services-2016-10?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/japanese-government-dating-s... [1] https://www.datingsitesreviews.com/article.php?story=iran-launches-state-run-dating-website https://www.datingsitesreviews.com/article.php?story=iran-la...
- thoughtstheseus 6y ago
  It would be easier to just pay people to have kids and make it an economic gain....
  - sunsetMurk 6y ago
    Imagine the two together.
  - skocznymroczny 6y ago
    It's not that simple. Many countries pay people to have kids, and it doesn't translate to increased birthrates as easily.
    - thoughtstheseus 6y ago
      I would enjoy learning more about these countries. It’s likely not enough of an economic gain.
- twic 6y ago
  Singapore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Development_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Development_Network

klmadfejno 6y ago

If I'm reading this correctly, they showed a series of pictures, one at a time, and told people to focus on faces that they found attractive. They then recorded EEG data to generate a score of perceived attractiveness, and used it to influence the GAN to make more beautiful faces. This is a very weird approach. If the goal is to personalize attractive faces, you could just have subjects rate pictures on a scale of 1-100. If you want to test EEG ratings of attractiveness, you should just compare manual ratings to EEG ratings without prompting them to focus on attractive faces. In all likelihood, the EEG has no idea if you think a particular face is attractive. They've just trained the AI to recognize when a user is focusing intently vs. not. Which is still kind of cool, but much less interesting than the headline suggests.

meowface 6y ago
>If you want to test EEG ratings of attractiveness, you should just compare manual ratings to EEG ratings without prompting them to focus on attractive faces. Yeah, as you say, it'd be very interesting if it could first associate self-reports of attractiveness with EEG activity, and then know roughly how attractive you consider someone based solely on blind EEG data. Then reverse the process by generating lots of faces and picking the one that someone seems to be most attracted to purely based on their EEG. (This is what I initially thought the study would be doing.) I suspect there would be major challenges with this, though. Besides EEG data possibly being too coarse, it's possible that what happens in the brain when you see someone you find attractive is very complicated and multifaceted. I think "attractiveness" may not be a single metric along a gradient even for a single individual's brain, let alone among a population. So even training on each person individually might not be that fruitful. For example, you may find two different people attractive due to a mix of reasons - some shared reasons, and some differing reasons. I'd guess the brain activity might differ in some ways in those cases. Maybe also even while looking at different photos of the same person, or even the same photo at different times. I know people tend to go through hormone cycles throughout the day; it's possible activity (as well as subjective attractiveness perception at a given time) may differ depending on what phase of a cycle you're in, or food, coffee, or alcohol you've had recently, etc. But who knows, maybe there often is some consistent pattern of activity which would serve as a decent proxy for overall attractiveness perception, if it could just be sifted out of the noise. This is probably just extremely difficult to do with current technology and neuroscience understanding, even if it may be feasible in theory. I'm sure we'll see more things like that in the coming decades.

bitwize 6y ago

Every copy of This Person Does Not Exist is personalized.

tablespoon 6y ago

Reminds me of this fantastic comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25418657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25418657: > You only started trying it out once they moved to GANS and VR headsets. You are not pathetic or anything, could get a real girl if you wanted to. Just don't have time. Have to focus on your career for now. "Build your empire then build your family", that's your motto. > You strap on the headset and see an adversarial generated girlfriend designed by world-class ML to maximize engagement. > She starts off as a generically beautiful young women; over the course of weeks she gradually molds both her appearance and your preferences such that competing products just won't do. > In her final form, she is just a grotesque undulating array of psychedelic colors perfectly optimized to introduce self-limiting microseizures in the pleasure center of the your brain. Were someone else to put on the headset, they would see only a nauseating mess. But to your eyes there is only Her. > It strikes you that true love does exist after all.

meowface 6y ago
Very insightful vision of a (proto-?)wireheading future. I suspect something similar to this may eventually be developed for AI-generated music, too. A kind of superstimulus or wirehead music that initially sounds strange and unintelligible but soon proves to be more pleasurable than anything you've ever heard before. Maybe even trained on and tailored to each individual's brain, to maximize pleasure and reward peaks. Perhaps with a little bit of optional user input, like sliders for fast, slow, bright, dark, intense, soft, "dopaminergically flat vs. spiky", etc.
- twic 6y ago
  Maybe that's what vaporwave already is.
m463 6y ago
> Were someone else to put on the headset, they would see only a nauseating mess. I imagine that would define hot mess.
Chris2048 6y ago
> undulating array of psychedelic colors perfectly optimized to introduce self-limiting microseizures in the pleasure center of the your brain Is there any science behind this being possible? I would have thought morphing blob of porn-shapes would be more realistic.

DubiousPusher 6y ago

> Eighty-seven percent of the time, the individual selected the new faces as being AMONGST the most attractive Anyone read the actual study to see what this means. Seems like an opening for some fudging.

apengwin 6y ago

So affirming to see my portrait in the paper!

_Microft 6y ago

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should", Ian Malcolm, Jurrasic Park This reminds me of a comment someone posted recently here. A situation was described that started with a virtual agent that was generally considered beautiful which was then optimized into a amorphous shape of colours that was the most attractive for this particular user. Edit: user "tablespoon" mentioned the same comment already, go check theirs for a link.

gaudat 6y ago

What if I am not attracted to the faces generated by the GAN? Say what if I prefer a different style, or even a drawing instead of an imitation of a real person? Can I hallucinate my own waifu with this?

zuminator 6y ago

It’s not far-fetched to imagine that by the end of the decade, a fair percentage of people’s Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok feeds will be generated characters based on their preferences as learned by the network. Engagement will be maximized because you’ll never be “all caught up.” There will always be a completely brand new image created on the fly available to capture your attention.

a_imho 6y ago
It is absolutely far fetched as far as I'm concerned. To me it is more plausible the new generation will not even care about insta/snapchat/tiktok. Do people still care about snapchat? Not sure about magic AI generated disposable entertainment either. I don't see it as feasible and even if it was, people would soon learn to filter it just like we filter spam and ads.
luplex 6y ago
I expect that today's social media paradigm will be recognized as harmful, just like Fast Food and Porn. Sure, sometimes you want to get that fix, but at that point its long-term utility will have degraded to nothing, so it's not something people will want to be addicted to.

numpad0 6y ago

Reminds me of recent "Let's draw porn using GA[1]" 1: (NSFW)https://gamingchahan.com/ecchi/ https://gamingchahan.com/ecchi/

LockAndLol 6y ago

I have a feeling this will be used in the future to select candidates for something like a job, beauty pageant, or simply for a " beauty ranking". The latter will probably be how they get test data (if they don't buy it from Facebook)

Gregam3 6y ago

Just another step towards the creation of our digital animas

rickdangerous1 6y ago

this coupled with deep fakes... could make things go really wrong in our societies. Demographic collapse inbound in 3,2,1.