
Handwriting Generation with Recurrent Neural Networks - cjdulberger
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~graves/handwriting.html
======
Aqueous
In both this demonstration and the demonstration by Google of image generation
by neural networks ([http://www.popsci.com/these-are-what-google-artificial-
intel...](http://www.popsci.com/these-are-what-google-artificial-
intelligences-dreams-look)) you can see hints of organic, naturalistic
behavior emerging from artificial networks. Is there any doubt that such
networks can simulate even more complex aspects of our cognition? Isn't the
writing on the wall (no joke intended) with regard to the Strong AI
hypothesis? Or at least a stronger weak hypothesis.

~~~
why-el
Are we sure what is being simulated here is cognitive? It seems to me merely
mechanical. Not to deride the achievement of course.

~~~
iaw
I think we may be reaching a point where the line between mechanical and
cognitive get blurred slightly. While I feel that this falls into the
mechanical end of the spectrum because I understand how the model was created,
RNN's demonstrate some very fascinating emergent behaviors that will become
more complex as computational power increases.

I wouldn't say that this is cognitive but it definitely learns to perform a
skill in a similar fashion to intelligent beings which is remarkable.
Extrapolating that behavior to self-awareness isn't likely however (of course
this could lead to a philosophical debate)

~~~
Aqueous
Wouldn't this be an example of motor cognition
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_cognition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_cognition))?
Isn't this essentially what motor cognition does when we write?

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Animats
That's cute. At last, the forgery app.

The killer app in this space will be when someone figures out how to extract a
vocal model from existing recordings of singers. Vocaloid already synthesizes
singing quite well, but a human singer has to go into a studio and sing a long
list of standard phrases to build the singer model. The next step will be to
feed existing singing into a system that extracts a model usable for
synthesis.

The RIAA is so going to hate this.

~~~
ericjang
I can imagine a near future whereby an RNN is trained to have an especially
lovely reading voice. A large number of people might actually become convinced
that the RNN is a person and develop empathy towards it.

~~~
eridal
haha combine that voice with some Markov chains, and you have the perfect
friend replacement app!

~~~
atom_enger
This is starting to sound a lot like
Her([http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/)).
It'll likely be the case one day.

~~~
sarwechshar
It leads me to wonder why we haven't seen (or at least heard about the
development of) an operating system with purely voice "UI" based on an RNN...
Especially after Her came out.

I understand it's hard but it also sounds like a fun project for people with
the relevant know-how.

~~~
ericjang
Andrew Ng gave a keynote at GTC in which he talked about bringing Baidu's Deep
Speech technology to phones (for accessibility). You betcha they're working on
it!

------
comex
It's interesting that the network will sometimes misspell words:

[http://i.imgur.com/cFrlyy8.png](http://i.imgur.com/cFrlyy8.png)

The input was copied from the instructions - "Type a message into the text
box, and the network will try to write it out longhand". But you can see it
skipped the "e" in "Type" and added an "h" after the "w" in "network", and
pretty clearly spelled "to" as "du".

It also tried to cross the first vertical line of the "w" in "network" in lieu
of adding an actual "t" beforehand (which is arguably an idiosyncrasy a
human's handwriting might have, if a rather odd one); and stuck a big phantom
stroke/letter between "T" and "y".

~~~
cristianpascu
It has no idea what it's doing. :)

~~~
rosstex
That or it's due to human error! Just like self-driving cars haha

~~~
sarwechshar
Ha! What do you mean by human error though? An analogy with the self-driving
cars example could be the human inadvertently made a typo when inputting the
text sample in the above link...whereas if the dataset used in "teaching" this
network to create handwritten text contained errors (e.g. the handwriting
samples had "to" instead of "the" and many instances of "The" were missing the
'e').

Unless I misunderstood how this was developed...that could be the case ha!

------
m0dest
It's interesting because handwritten notes are seen as one of the last symbols
of human authenticity. The unique drawing of each letter seems to prove that a
human invested time and thought in directly communicating with you. There was
no copy-paste. There was no form letter. This was not a bot. And, based on the
length of the note, there was provable effort involved. Both a Turing test and
a proof of work problem. The world's oldest Captcha.

And so begins the devaluing of that proof. Just like when marketers started
reproducing the "signature" on every sales letter with blue-colored toner,
mimicking the authenticity of a hand signature.

I don't write handwritten letters, and I don't romanticize the past. But our
dwindling ability to assess the authenticity of incoming communication is
slightly unsettling.

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Rexxar
Very strange results with rare Unicode characters (I used "𝕳𝖔𝖜 𝖜𝖊𝖑𝖑 𝖉𝖔𝖊𝖘 𝖙𝖍𝖎𝖘
𝖜𝖔𝖗𝖐")

[https://imgur.com/a/Li8OZ](https://imgur.com/a/Li8OZ)

~~~
jwuphysics
Likewise: [http://imgur.com/ux3xfL5](http://imgur.com/ux3xfL5)

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prajit
I implemented this system for the final project of my computer vision class.
Couldn't get it to work by the deadline, but I'm very familiar with this
paper. Happy to answer any questions.

~~~
poizan42
I'm slightly alarmed by urls such as:
[http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~graves/handwriting.cgi?text=Hej&s...](http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~graves/handwriting.cgi?text=Hej&style=..%2Fdata%2Ftrainset_diff_no_start_all_labels.nc%2C973%2B905&bias=0.15&samples=3)

Relative paths allowed from user input is usually a HUGE warning sign. Are you
sure I can't make it open arbitrary files? What happens to your cgi script if
it reads a file in the wrong format?

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fallinghawks
I'm curious as to what happened here:

Text entered: this is a test of handwriting generation

Style sample #1 selected.

All other settings at default.

[http://imgur.com/6b1G5Tj](http://imgur.com/6b1G5Tj)

Edit: I've tried a couple other styles and haven't duplicated this craziness.

~~~
CatharticMonkey
It obviously gets bored sometimes and decides it'd rather draw pretty pictures
of mountain ranges or something.

[http://imgur.com/uz60af1](http://imgur.com/uz60af1)

~~~
fallinghawks
Humans doodle, so it does too, I guess :)

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Retr0spectrum
Does anyone know what happened here[0]? The input text was "This is a test.
Reeeeeeeeeeeeee!", and I chose the third style.

[0] [http://i.imgur.com/6B9JkjC.png](http://i.imgur.com/6B9JkjC.png)

~~~
Tiksi
Symbols seem to do strange things as well. The input was :

    
    
      !@#$%^&*()_+ 
    

here's 3 runs of it with bias all the way down:

[http://paste.click/KNIJov](http://paste.click/KNIJov)

[http://paste.click/PPjKXC](http://paste.click/PPjKXC)

[http://paste.click/RtZCtG](http://paste.click/RtZCtG)

As I turned up the bias, it seems to trend to the letter g:

[http://paste.click/hJrVlX](http://paste.click/hJrVlX)

Some symbols seem to just fail, I'm guessing that's a bug in the serializing.

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Trufa
VERY impressive demo but I find it kind of funny the extra effort it takes to
produce a "worse font".

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panic
Creepy: [http://i.imgur.com/jvbK94t.png](http://i.imgur.com/jvbK94t.png)

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ChrisGranger
You could use this in conjunction with something like Cleverbot to create a
virtual pen-pal who sends you snail mail letters.

~~~
sarwechshar
And combine it with holographic technology to have 3D Skype calls with them
too?

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hayksaakian
This is really cool!

I could see it being used in games to generate hand written notes from data
files.

~~~
romaniv
For games you could get far more readable results by far simpler means. For
example, add slight randomization of vectors to an existing font.

~~~
espadrine
Has that been used in a game already? I'm curious.

