
Show HN: This Fursona Does Not Exist - arfafax
https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/
======
wjnc
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
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
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.

~~~
proverbialbunny
That doesn't make them not made up. Even a primary personality is made up.

------
Jon_Lowtek
> 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
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
Depends how creative the AI is. Human artists are trained on copyrighted
images too.

~~~
lloeki
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_cr...](https://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_laws_that_choke_creativity)

------
lokl
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.

------
nrr
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
What?

~~~
derefr
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.

~~~
Izkata
> 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
"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.)

------
corysama
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)

~~~
GauntletWizard
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
That is obviously not true if you watch any interpolation videos or do any
nearest-neighbor lookups.

------
Loughla
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.

~~~
dTal
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)

~~~
slavik81
There might be traces of Pikachu in that, but it's definitely Renamon.
[https://digimon.fandom.com/wiki/Renamon](https://digimon.fandom.com/wiki/Renamon)

~~~
Izkata
More-comparable straight-on image here:
[https://neoencyclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Renamon](https://neoencyclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Renamon)

------
CodeCube
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
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-
mo...](https://www.gwern.net/Faces#reversing-stylegan-to-control-modify-
images) So if someone wanted, they could use Arfa's model to edit images.

~~~
CodeCube
This is incredible, thanks for sharing!

------
tomphoolery
This looks like a Zoom meeting with 4chan.

------
kick
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
Just wait until AI create random cartoon shows and comedy that end up being
funny. That will be uncanny.

~~~
kick
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.

~~~
minimaxir
The funny thing about the AI meme generator is per the technical write up
([https://towardsdatascience.com/meme-text-generation-with-
a-d...](https://towardsdatascience.com/meme-text-generation-with-a-deep-
convolutional-network-in-keras-tensorflow-a57c6f218e85)), that network is even
less advanced than the old recurrent neural network approaches. (it uses
convolutional neural networks which are more used for images than text
nowadays)

However, this is the one case where more incoherence works better.

~~~
gwern
Yes, it's a testament to crowdsourcing and filtering. Many people have argued
that 'generation + filtering = creativity', and it's impressive what
NNs+crowds can do. The NNs are unhindered by any merely human considerations
and are indefatigable, while the crowd brings the filtering & evaluation to
select just the best candidates.

------
teddyh
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
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)

------
logfromblammo
This AI passes the Furing Test.

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

~~~
gwern
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.

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

------
nootropicat
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.

~~~
avian
> 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.

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

------
rideontime
> 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
> 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
> 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
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
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'.)

~~~
fenwick67
When a significant number look like zootopia characters I don't think you can
claim they "can't be traced back to the original", lots of these are overfit

~~~
gwern
They are not 'overfit' unless they are exactly the same and they cannot
generalize. But you can see the wide variety of high quality faces which are
not copied from the dataset and that the interpolations are fine:
[https://twitter.com/arfafax/status/1258344026706599937](https://twitter.com/arfafax/status/1258344026706599937)

Generating a recognizable character is no more 'overfit' than a painter being
able to paint George Washington means their brain is 'overfit'. If those
characters are part of the data distribution, as they are, then the GAN _can
and should_ generate them and countless variants on them.

~~~
fenwick67
My point is that just because you get the zootopia fox out of a GAN doesn't
mean the zootopia fox is public domain.

~~~
gwern
Perhaps not, but that is completely different from what data it uses or
whether it is 'overfit'.

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

------
arfafax
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.

------
andrewstuart
I'd love to see this for spaceships.

------
dj_gitmo
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
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!"

------
philpem
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
Some furries were already having this discourse as soon as this hit HN.

------
amelius
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 ...

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

------
kixiQu
No horned animals? Discrimination!

~~~
lykr0n
Or scalies. They all seem to trend towards feminine cat/fox 'sonas. I guess
it's a result of the data-set used.

~~~
duskwuff
> 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
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.

------
qqssccfftt
> Girls are fetching fursonas. Please wait warmly

Nice ref there.

