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This beach does not exist
- vsemecky 5y agoLaunching a new hobby deep learning project https://ThisBeachDoesNotExist.com https://ThisBeachDoesNotExist.com - a synthetic beach image generator built on a neural network StyleGAN.
- GistNoesis 5y agoIs this a ShowHN ? It looks nice, but I don't feel safe using untrusted pickle weights of pretrained models, as they can allow for arbitrary code execution.
- vsemecky 5y agoProbably yes, although I'm not sure I understand exactly what ShowHN is. I fully understand your concerns, but I don't know how to guarantee that the pkl is ok. Don't run it on your computer, but in some isolated environment, like Colab.
- GistNoesis 5y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html I'd argue that running untrusted code in a Colab is even worse, as you'd risk your account instead of just your computer. I don't think pickle files can be loaded safely, it's better to use a numpy archive npz to store the weights which can be loaded without a security risk by using allow_pickle=false when loading (the default since numpy 1.16.3)
- im3w1l 5y agoThe solution is to use a different format that is safer.
- gus_massa 5y agoNice! Only a small feature request: When you click the button to get another set of random images or another cluster in the knn, the page waits until the new image is loaded to update it, so it "does nothing" for half a second. I'd like that it instantly shows a spinning thing or other signal to show that it's waiting for info and will be updated soon.
- axiosgunnar 5y agoIs this the end of stock footage copyright?
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoOne can hope, but I'm afraid it'll only make things more complicated. In theory you could train a generator on stock footage. In theory the stock footage copyright holder could sue you for creating a derivative work without paying them. In theory that claim could be bunkus if the creator used a different training set - how do you prove a generated image's origins?
- evancox100 5y agoDecent case that the derivative work is transformative and protected by fair use. (And yes I realize that doesn't stop them from suing you, just pointing out)
- cocktailpeanuts 5y agoHow would you know which stock photo was used for training? Someone may take a whole bunch of images they buy on a dark market, create a huge train model, and dump it on the public internet over torrent or something. And there would be no way to know which images were used to train the model
- laurent123456 5y agoPerhaps as this technique becomes more and more used there will be regulations on the source data set, such as the requirement to prove you own all of it (or that it is in the public domain).
- teekert 5y agoJust like Co-pilot is the end of the GPL-ed code?
- dylan604 5y agoWould the AI technically own the copyright to the work they just produced?
- darkwater 5y agoIn some of these pictures [1][2][3] the vegetation and the rocks look like if they had been "photoshopped" by some amateur. Anyway it's a great start for sure! [1] https://thisbeachdoesnotexist.com/data/seeds-075/4375.jpg https://thisbeachdoesnotexist.com/data/seeds-075/4375.jpg [2] https://thisbeachdoesnotexist.com/data/seeds-075/3300.jpg https://thisbeachdoesnotexist.com/data/seeds-075/3300.jpg [3] https://thisbeachdoesnotexist.com/data/seeds-075/7638.jpg https://thisbeachdoesnotexist.com/data/seeds-075/7638.jpg
- Pxtl 5y agoYeah, the texture on the rocks in [3] look more like the animal hide of a giant animal like an elephant or a rhino than they do stone.
- moron4hire 5y agoNVidia has some interesting developments in this vein, specifically with temporal coherence so subsequent frames of animation are consistent over time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jl0XCslxwB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jl0XCslxwB0
- amelius 5y agoI'm waiting for a "this X does not exist" website generator.
- pantulis 5y ago"This GAN does not exist"
- dredmorbius 5y agoThis GAN could not exist.
- facethewolf 5y ago"This this x does not exist does not exist"
- whymauri 5y agoI was actually thinking about the details of implementing this after reading the title.
- scubbo 5y agoSame :) seems like you could get pretty decent results just selecting random nouns?
- whymauri 5y agoI would like to also couple an algorithm to generate those images. Maybe just randomly select nouns for the title, but pass on augmented/cleaned versions of the title to some generator + CLIP to autogenerate fitting images.
- cltsang 5y ago"This website does not exist" recursion paradox joke :)
- egfx 5y agoIt used to be called stumbleupon.
- marcodiego 5y agoI'd say these images have high artistic value. In the coming years it is very likely that "real art" will be confined to snobs and most people will be able to buy non series produced high quality automatically generated art.
- Touche 5y agoI've never understood the appeal of photorealistic art anyways, so I'll be happy to be labeled a snob that likes art that looks like art.
- andrenotgiant 5y agoI agree, I think most photorealistic art lost most of its appeal when color photography came out. Maybe there's a brief moment of "I'm impressed with how much work you put into this" but for that to happen, you kind of have to see the work being done. I think that's why impressionism has such staying power, impressionists realized that your brain doesn't need photorealism. They were panned by their contemporaries who were focused on photorealism, but time has proven they were onto something. Even now the impressionist-style neural nets don't get it right.
- vharuck 5y ago>Maybe there's a brief moment of "I'm impressed with how much work you put into this" but for that to happen, you kind of have to see the work being done. Or be knowledgeable enough to estimate the effort and skill required. Ironically, things I took for granted when I was young have impressed me more and more over the years. Probably because I've either tried to do them myself or learned about their backgrounds. So I'm not surprised artists and at enthusiasts would value realism more than most people. Just like how speed metal is probably more popular among guitarists. The technique becomes a source of value rather than just an implementation detail.
- Touche 5y agoI'm an artist that doesn't like photorealism. I can appreciate the skill without wanting to spend much time looking at it. The imperfections and accidents are what make art pieces interesting to me.
- AndrewOMartin 5y agoDo these projects ever have a way to ensure the output isn't just one of the elements of the training set? Is it simply something that would be of negligible probability of happening?
- atorodius 5y agoTypically they would investigate something like the closest (in terms of eg MSE) image from the training set.
- jstx1 5y agoHow do you compute MSE between images?
- unoti 5y agoHow to get MSE between images: 1. Express each pixel as a vector of numbers, probably with RGB. 2. For each of the color vectors, for each of the colors, subtract the color 1 from color 2. 3. Square those differences, and add them. In this way you can get mean squared error for each pixel or for the entire image.
- jstx1 5y agoRight but I don't see how it's useful in this context given that rotations, reflections and translations of an object across the canvas can give you high MSE while retaining most of the original image.
- atorodius 5y agoAgreed, but it would be surprising (impossible depending on the arch) if the CNN learned such transformations.
- IdiocyInAction 5y agoMSE is kind of crappy for images; you'd use something like image-specific, like SSIM.
- sdflhasjd 5y agoWhen they do these "Random Latent Walk" animations, it becomes apparent that some features sort of... stay still (i.e the detail in the leaves seems to not actually move, but the larger features such as branches move around it) Does this artifacting have a name?
- soraki_soladead 5y agoThis problem was recently addressed in detail here[1] which serves as a good overview. 1. https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.12423 https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.12423 (project page: https://nvlabs.github.io/alias-free-gan/ https://nvlabs.github.io/alias-free-gan/)
- moron4hire 5y agoHoly... ! That second video, the character on the right, one of her incisors ends up in the middle of her mouth. It's amazing how these things can get so many details right, just from analyzing existing images, but some details like the symmetry of teeth get lost.
- Yajirobe 5y agoHow do you know it really does not exist? There is this effect called 'over-fitting', where you might expect an exact sample from the training set to show up in the video
- rob74 5y agoNice effort, but as with all these "this X does not exist" image generators, it gives you an uncanny feeling. Something about some of the images is slightly off, but you (or at least I) are not able to put your finger on it most of the time. One of the things I was able to put my finger on are the palm trees - some of them have leaves hanging in mid-air...
- gpvos 5y agoOr entire trees...
- bradrn 5y agoFor me, what really stood out were the rocks — real rocks just don’t have those sorts of textures.
- dylan604 5y agoI was hoping to see something like in Contact where everything looks normal except something is weird. They made the waves run in reverse so they appear to be originating from the beach.
- BitwiseFool 5y agoI thought they looked great at first but as soon as I started taking a closer look, everything started to look very wrong. I'm certain growing up near an ocean gave me a more critical eye.
- samkater 5y agoAgreed on the nice effort comment. The ones showing the scene from a distance took me some extra time to figure out what was "off". For me it is the whitecaps on the water (if present). Some of the pictures appear to show waves going in the opposite direction of their surroundings. One of those things that when you see it, you can't really unsee it.
- brandnewlow 5y agoCan you share links to some others of these?
- npilk 5y agoDoes anyone else get extremely powerful uncanny valley vibes from these AI-generated images? Even the ones that are pretty good give me a sort of deep existential horror. Actually the original “this person does not exist” wasn’t so bad, but things like this, DALL-E, or the sheep one that was posted the other day I find extremely unsettling and can’t explain why.
- tokamak-teapot 5y agoAbsolutely. I've been wondering if noticing that 'something feels wrong' is a deeply ingrained response related perhaps to survival. When a possible threat is detected, even when it's not clear what the threat is, it's time to feel very uncomfortable.
- seph-reed 5y agoMost of human comfort (which isn't pharmaceutically induced) comes from a sense of familiarity. Unfortunately, this is also where most people get their sense of "truthiness," but that's another story. Anyways, if you were raised in a machine with these images and then shown the real world, I wonder if it would be a relief or also uncanny? I know that when it comes to sound, it's really hard to create organic sounds. And that part of our ability to hear sounds happens (theoretically) before the brain, in the form of grouping harmonic series together into isolated sound sources. Perhaps eyes do something similar? Some sort of pre-processing that functionally works for all natural phenomena, kind of like the harmonic series does for sound.
- phkahler 5y ago>> Absolutely. I've been wondering if noticing that 'something feels wrong' is a deeply ingrained response related perhaps to survival. I thought the latest thinking is that most of what we "see" is really a projection from our own mind (similar to how these images are generated) and our attention is drawn to those areas where our projection and sensory input don't match. So yes, we are evolved to be alerted when "something feels wrong" because it's unexpected and could be a danger. The mismatch can happen at any level of the hierarchy. One person here said some waves appeared to be moving the wrong way for the rest of a scene. Things like that are at a higher level of abstraction than rock textures or tree trunks with gaps. Some things might seem wrong but take more time to identify or explain what the problem is.
- steelframe 5y agoLong-shot request: Generate 3D models of beaches like this for a flight simulator.
- systematical 5y agoThe rocks are really bad
- dredmorbius 5y agoRock is dead, they say.
- dougSF70 5y agoSurely, the title should be the "photo of this beach does not exist". Beach photos are always a bit samey so it is probably more straight forward to train AI to build a random beach photo than to actual build a map of a beach.
- username91 5y agoThe video on the site is very enjoyable to have on in the background at 0.25x speed.
- dylan604 5y agoIt's like one of those sci-fi time travle movies or docuseries showing the evolution of the earth/techtonic plates/etc.
- bencollier49 5y agoThere's a character in "Soylent Green", an old fellow who claims that there used to be all sorts of wonderful nature back in the past, but no-one believes him. I feel like this stuff could facilitate a similar situation.
- stolenmerch 5y agoWould love to see some blind study on what people actually find "uncanny" vs. what they think is uncanny because they are told it's a generated image. Maybe I don't fully understand the concept of the "uncanny valley" but simply saying This Looks Shopped isn't uncanniness.
- moron4hire 5y agoThe problem with that is that the very definition of "uncanny" is that it is subjective. You see it and feel that it is off, without being able to explain why.
- yakshaving_jgt 5y agoPlot twist: These are all real beaches but they no longer exist because of climate change.
- Minor49er 5y agoPlot twist: These were all real but don't exist anymore because no man can step in the same river twice, let alone swim at the same beach
- dredmorbius 5y agoPlot twist: What is a man? Naked chicken sits in cave watching shadows on walls....
- srg0 5y agoI think that these images are less convincing than "thispersondoesnotexist". The network did well for the extent a tree is similar to a person: long palm leaves look are like green hair, and look passable. The network did bad where it had to take into account global illumination, or distance to the object and its level of detail: 1) tree trunks are mostly flat and do not depend on the possible sun location; 2) shadows don't match the trees and the rocks; 3) nearby rocks often lack texture and are not properly illuminated (they look flat). It's not surprising given that the method is fundamentally local (CNN-based). I think better results will be achieved when a generator creates a scene graph rather than a raster. Are there works which actually create a 3D scene (or use it as an internal representation)?
- andrewmcwatters 5y agoGiven that these scenes are produced from existing rasters, I don’t know how you would do that without either data classification or time of day/GI inference. You’d have to do spacial inference to produce the 3D scenes which is more complicated, and then at that point if you’re using the generated raster output as textures, you’d have to normalize them to their albedos and then do global illumination from there.
- srg0 5y agoI do not follow recent CV research anymore, but there were various "3D from a single image" techniques even 10-15 years ago. I suppose some progress has been made. A quick search turns up this paper https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content/CVPR2021/papers/Zhang_Holistic_3D_Scene_Understanding_From_a_Single_Image_With_Implicit_CVPR_2021_paper.pdf https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content/CVPR2021/papers/Zhang_... So it's possible to infer not only depth map, but also an accurate scene graph. Estimating illumination and texture synthesis have also been done in the past. Maybe it is not necessary to go all the way into proper 3D and ray tracing, but it can be possible to use 3D representation as one of the intermediate layers. My point is these generators should embed some kind of domain model to look more realistic.
- cunthorpe 5y agoThe video made me seasick
- spike021 5y agoInteresting work. I wish the video paused on at least some of the beaches though so you can actually look at them before they transform into the next one.
- dvh 5y agoI recognize some photos from pexels(dot)com, they are all public domain.
- optimalsolver 5y agoMy favorite of these is This Chemical Does Not Exist: https://www.thischemicaldoesnotexist.com/ https://www.thischemicaldoesnotexist.com/
- licebmi__at__ 5y agoAs someone who is terrified of the deep sea (caused probably by Lovecraft's work), I find the artifacts on the images truly unsettling.
- ctoth 5y agoWhat a fancy way to wreck a nice beach.
- andrewmcwatters 5y agoOne thing that gets me about GANs is that whatever approach is used to generate the outputs always results in GAN-look; these images always look “fuzzy” and objects have “hairy” boundaries which I suspect is the result of some common gradient function technique blending the output in ways that are identifiably artificial. Plenty of photographs have crisp object definitions in the real world. These do not. Trees blend into humans standing on the beach.
- ryankrage77 5y agoI like to download the image sets from these "x does not exist" sites. Most only have a few thousand images with sequential filenames (one notable exception being thispersondoesnotexist, which has no filenames, so I made a script that hashed the files and discarded duplicates. I stopped at 50,000 images without finding a single duplicate). Anyway, to grab all these beach images, I used this command: wget -w 3 --random-wait https://thisbeachdoesnotexist.com/data/seeds-075/{1..9999}.jpg Average file size is 130KB, total 1.3GB.
- adminscoffee 5y agoon a beach... nowhere.