
Artificial Intelligence Creates Realistic Pictures of People - Liriel
http://www.openculture.com/2018/12/artificial-intelligence-creates-realistic-photos-of-people-none-of-whom-actually-exist.html
======
14
I love it. I listen to my dads stories and not that long ago you could up and
moves states or country and leave your past behind. Then the Internet happened
and there was no escaping your past. Speeding tickets could find you. Arrests
records were kept online and your identity could catch up to you in an
instance. I hope more of this AI stuff takes off and we get some of that
deniability anonymity back. I truly do think the Internet was an awesome
landscape when people could express themselves openly and feel they were truly
anonymous. These fake images may give us back some of that sense anything
could be real or fake around us.

~~~
KineticLensman
The idea that improving technology will make it impossible to 'leave your past
behind' is a key plot point in the 1989 SF book 'The Boat of a Million Years'
by Poul Anderson [0]

<spoiler>

The story concerns people who are effectively immortal barring death by
massive injury. They don't age and often face ostracism or worse by
superstitious or resentful neighbours / friends / children. They frequently
(re)use the obvious solution - moving on and assuming a new identity - many
times over 2000 years of different episodes. However, this becomes untenable
and they eventually reveal their identity to a population that is itself
becoming long-lived due to improved medical technology.

It's a great read and one of those that illustrates the fact that good SF
writers can often write extremely good historical novels. Many of its
historical episodes are superb interpretations of periods of history that
nowadays aren't particularly well known., e.g. in the post-Roman near east.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boat_of_a_Million_Years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boat_of_a_Million_Years)

~~~
signa11
oh, there is a movie on similar lines called "the man from earth" where the
protagonist claims to have survived for 15 or so millennia. to keep others
from realizing that he doesn't age, he moves every decade or so...

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throwawaymath
Can anyone tell me if it's reasonable to think this technology might
substantially replace or augment movie CGI in the future? I have no domain
experience with CGI or graphical simulation, but I have a passing interest as
an occasional admirer of what shows up on /r/simulated.

Does modern CGI make use of machine learning like this? If not, what does it
have in common aside from significant use of GPUs? What are the computational
intensive parts of CGI, and what are the heavily manual and labor intensive
parts of the CGI development workflow?

~~~
delinka
Keep in mind that these are stills. Once the motion starts, humans detect the
not-quite-realness easily. Even the 2D video creations by AI aren’t stitched
correctly, let alone getting all the details of an animated 3D person right.

~~~
dylan604
They are getting closer, but I do agree that it is still not quite there. It's
pretty common practice now at the beginning of each film production to do full
image capture of all of the main talent. It's a back up in case something
untoward happens that the film can still be finished by using their 3D
likeness.

~~~
cm2187
You mean for an Oliver Reed/Gladiator scenario?

~~~
ptrott2017
More commonly for postproduction fixes (think stunts and inserting talent
likeness, relighting/reframing a shot, inserting reflections when CG-ing the
background of a window etc.…) so you can fix sequences without having to
recall talent which can produce availability delays and additional expense
beyond what it takes to fix digitally.

------
waffl
This reminds me of an old story of how the Japanese idol band AKB48 added a
new member who turned out to be a computer composite in 2011, to think what
they could do with technology today and in the future:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piZ2TkdK4Dw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piZ2TkdK4Dw)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aimi_Eguchi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aimi_Eguchi)

~~~
ryanmercer
Somewhat related, there's also a Japanese character/synth/software package
called Hatsune Miku that is flat out an animated hologram that is just a voice
synthesizer for its voice.

It is currently on tour...

~~~
dylan604
You posted this while I was looking up the link to post. Else I would have
replied to you

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mtw
One day, we're going to have google hangouts or phone calls with "people" that
look, act, talk like they're real, but are actually AI. I dread when scammers
will get their hands on this tech. I'm already have enough trouble getting 5
calls a day about automated voice scams, imagine getting a call from an AI
that acts and talks like a real person.

~~~
a3n
I dread when law enforcement get their hands on it. This will take planting
evidence on a "suspect" up an order of magnitude.

~~~
Fjolsvith
That will be the day when you have your personal evidence recording device on
24/7 so you can prove your alibi.

~~~
swagasaurus-rex
And in court they can claim the alibi is a high-fidelity fabrication.

~~~
Diederich
A possible protection could be: person can emit, every N minutes, a high bit
cryptographic checksum of the previous checksum plus the last N minutes of
recorded video.

Send that value to the 'forever', public registry in the cloud, AKA some combo
of Twitter, Facebook, GMail, FastMail, AliMail, etc.

To be fabricated, it would have to be done in something approaching real time.
Not absolute safety, but a seemingly easy step in that direction.

~~~
rauhl
Sounds like an actual use for a blockchain! One could even commingle others’
checksum streams in order to make it even more difficult to rewrite history.

~~~
Fjolsvith
That would help prove you were with such and such person or not with them.

------
kijin
> But still, "you can’t doctor any image in any way you like with the same
> fidelity. There are also serious constraints when it comes to expertise and
> time. It took Nvidia’s researchers a week training their model on eight
> Tesla GPUs to create these faces."

That doesn't sound like a high hurdle at all. As soon as the algorithm is
known, anyone with money to burn will be able to fire up a bunch of AWS GPU
instances and create authentic-looking photos of people doing something they
actually didn't.

If you have some relevant knowledge and want a job that lets you travel all
over the place at no cost to yourself, now is the time to become a forensic
expert with a specialty in detecting AI-doctored evidence. Yes, there are
already people who make a living testifying in court that a document is
typeset in a font that didn't exist when it was purportedly printed, etc.

~~~
ryanmercer
>That doesn't sound like a high hurdle at all. As soon as the algorithm is
known, anyone with money to burn will be able to fire up a bunch of AWS GPU
instances

Or their non-profitable mining rigs.

------
jmiserez
Original article here: [https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/17/18144356/ai-image-
genera...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/17/18144356/ai-image-generation-
fake-faces-people-nvidia-generative-adversarial-networks-gans)

Source paper:
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.04948.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.04948.pdf)

~~~
ivan_ah
Placeholder doc for where the code+data will be hosted:
[http://stylegan.xyz/code](http://stylegan.xyz/code)

Explainer video for the paper:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSLJriaOumA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSLJriaOumA)

------
xte
Ok, now imaging a paperless future, with plenty of surveillance devices and
imaging who much can count computing powers to create fake evidence of pretty
anything for tons of different purpose including, but not limited to:

\- orient people behavior with nearly unverifiable and absolutely plausible
news;

\- do illegal activities as a large powerful corporation and plausible denying
anything with forged proofs no one can really verify (think about what happen
inside megafactories);

\- false accuse with skyrocketing high effectiveness anyone that disturb
big&powerful;

\- essentially centralize even more actual society because yes, we automate,
but we do not automate simply with open tech in a free market on n-th
competing players and open core knowledge publicly granted by public
universities but with VERY few super-giant transnational player with
universities reduced at Ford-model workers "production factories".

Imaging how easy we can invent a kind of "widespread illness" just to sell a
dummy medicine that does nothing but cost big money so give big money to it's
vendor. Imaging how easy we can depict a country, or even a small area of a
nation as awful just to move people around. All things can be verified, in
theory, but if all tools are made by few big&powerful and are closed black
boxes our effective "verification power" it became REALLY limited and so it
became our ability to communicate since being everywhere more and more "remote
workers" with less physical social contacts and no really free means of
communication... We do not even need censorship; it suffice suffocating
unwanted news under a stream of other news and silently delete them after a
certain amount of time. It's super-easy spread FUD against any unwanted news
etc.

Nothing new under the sun of course, only at an unprecedented level with too
few that can do too much, without the need of a certain support chain like
ancient dictators still need.

~~~
mkl
I think you probably mean "imagine" rather than "imaging". We are talking
about fake images and the imaging of imaginary people, so your comment is a
bit confusing.

~~~
xte
My English is really poor.

The meaning of my comment is essentially: try to image how easy will became
forging false proofs for subjects with enough computational resources and
skill. Add to the scenario the actual trend toward few and few subjects with
knowledge and infrastructure that act as a "platform of our society"...

Hope it's more clear now.

------
smusamashah
I believe that best of these generated faces will have a 90% match in training
dataset.

If you go through the generated faces you can see all of them have different
background. These are not generated from scratch, only picked from memory to
match the requirements.

Each face has totally different hair and hairstyle.

Have the published the training dataset?

~~~
bitL
The previous version of this published a year ago was using public CelebA
dataset; and no, vast majority of generated faces were different than training
dataset. You could even change latent variables for continuous "morphs"
between various synthetic faces, each stage being a unique face. Read on how
GANs work first if you have doubts.

~~~
smusamashah
I have a rough idea that how it works but I am still skeptic.

Faces of kids specially are unbelievable to be generated. Their backgrounds,
clothes, hair facial expressions seem all very unique to that picture. I will
be going through the dataset to find the matches once they release it.

~~~
sometime
It can be demonstrated that GANs learn to model certain image contents with
separate input variables like the presence of certain objects or 3D rotations
[0] all by themselves, so there is definitely more going on than simply
learning to paint some image patches at certain locations and smoothly
interpolating them. An image patch reveals itself directly in the training
data, so the image patch could simply be stored in the network weights, but a
3D rotation or the presence of a certain class of objects cannot be learned by
simply copying image patches into the weights. A 3D rotation requires at the
very least a computation of foreshortening, occlusion perhaps based on a depth
map. An object detector requires at the very least a feature hierarchy,
perhaps binding computations that relate different object parts to the whole
object.

Neural networks basically learn to implement nearly arbitrary computations (up
to a certain circuit depth) to produce the desired output, so you can also
think of deep learning as _program mining_ of a certain program space that is
reachable by the adaptive functions in a neural network. Stephen Wolfram has
written about that in his blog and talked about it in one of his podcasts. So
it's basically magic much like evolution, and it will probably destroy us
because it's simply too powerful.

[0]
[https://twitter.com/phillip_isola/status/1066567846711476224](https://twitter.com/phillip_isola/status/1066567846711476224)

------
csomar
Here is my best guess of the first usage: If I marry this men/woman, how will
my kids look like? (approximatively). I wonder if there will be a Tinder app
for that.

~~~
tyingq
Sadly, the first use will likely be creating lots of more realistic shill
accounts on Twitter.

------
typeformer
Wow! Another incredible consequence of this tech is that it will actually make
blockchain based confirmations of unadulterated digital assests a valuable and
needed service as the amount of well crafted fakes soars exponentially. A
service that I didn’t see having a big amount of market potential now seems
essential.

~~~
PeterisP
This point has come up a lot in earlier discussions; the short summary of it
is that signatures/blockchains/whatever can't provide anything useful in this
regard.

I really don't want to repeat all of this here, but in essence: (1) you'd need
all (and I mean _all_ , not most; so all the currently existing devices need
to be replaced) of devices that can capture video (and thus can sign/confirm
the thing that they captured) to be fully outside of user control, if 0.01% of
devices are jailbroken, it fails; (2) you'd need all the manufacturers of such
devices (which put the appropriate secrets in the devices) and all the supply
chain in between to be 100% trustworthy, since if a manufacturer gives 100
phones to a spy agency that'll happily sign anything as "unadulterated" then
it fails; (3) you'd need to figure out a magic way to prevent the analog
loophole, as with specialized expensive optics you could project arbitrary
pixels to the camera sensor so that the camera would "believe" that it's
seeing the exact pixels in reality.

A blockchain would allow you to securely assert things like "this data was
seen and signed by device #1234/(or approved by user id #456) no later than
this moment", and not more than that. It can't really _prove_ that this data
reflects reality somehow; a physical device that has the technical ability to
take a picture of my face and add a "it's unadulterated" tag to it can be used
(with appropriate effort) to take a fake AI-generated picture and add the same
"it's unadulterated" tag.

~~~
typeformer
Great points,

I still think this coming despite all of the reasonable limitations you
listed. Our society will desire some form of authenticity and I can imagine an
alliance of companies coming together to provide that.

------
Waterluvian
I remember when super celebrity [redacted] had her 100K stolen. You know, the
package of one hundred thousand photos a celebrity has taken so that movie
studios can inject their likeness without their presence?

It was funny when the internet was making her say and do dumb stuff. She took
it all in pretty good spirit. I think it was the porn, especially the age-
deflation stuff, that finally caused her to retire from the public.

------
jcims
I think the sleeper in this article is at the end where they are applying the
same technique to inanimate objects. Imagine what this could do to inspire
designs and help people that have a good eye but aren’t able to pull it all
together in the form of a finished product. With the degree of automation
we’re heading towards, the era of bespoke commodity goods is going to be a
money maker.

~~~
ikeyany
Seems like this would replace creative designers with a "creative black box
algorithm".

------
shreyas-satish
Aside from fake news, I can't help but wonder: what is the probability that
the “generated” faces do not closely resemble people IRL?

An immediate use case that jumped to mind was DIY stock photos or even movies.
But, with the above question still hanging, I'm not sure how comfortable I'd
be using this.

~~~
krick
Well, taken a random human from the population, what is the probability he
doesn't resemble anyone else alive? This is not really a mathematical
question, since "resembles" is undefined and it really depends on the
biological nature of human morphology, but I'm pretty sure that except for
pathologically abnormal cases the answer always will be close to zero.

------
tylerleonhardt
Slack should change their random profile pics to these

------
vbuwivbiu
imagine when people first starting telling stories 50k years ago, how it must
have felt to listeners at the time "but these people you speak of don't
exist!"

~~~
lolc
We can assume (but not prove) that people back then were deeply animistic. You
could talk to them about the soul of stones and they wouldn't flinch.

~~~
usrusr
It's an interesting, even if highly speculative thought experiment: would
there be much animism before storytelling? I don't think that the answer is
clear.

(now I'm off on a tangent reading
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deception_in_animals](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deception_in_animals)
)

~~~
lolc
I would assume that our drive to see intent even in happenstance is older than
language. But yeah, highly speculative. Sapir & Whorf would disagree :-)

------
alexcnwy
I legit registered aistockphotos.com when I first saw that paper.

------
eric24234
Is it ethical to make porn pics out of generated images ?

------
ryanmercer
Great, more false hopes on dating apps for me ha! They'll look more real than
all of the women using snapchat filters on their profile photos.

~~~
Kalium
You joke, but one of the applications for this will almost certainly be to
generate fake dating app profiles that look more realistic. The plague of
false profiles looks set to get worse.

~~~
ryanmercer
No, I was being quite serious. Instead of ripping low-rez eastern European
model photos now they can just churn out the 'ideal woman' for any number of
cultures/sub-cultures.

It won't stop at dating apps either, they'll be able to build all sorts of
fake social media accounts that can generate new photo content over and over
to back up a persona/legend and/or a narrative for all sorts of nefarious
reasons.

You'll have OGAs, private groups like PIAs, hacker/carder groups etc all doing
this. Hell, you'll be able to have some 12 year old sitting in his bedroom
generating private shoot content of a dozen women for whatever the most
trending genres on pornhub are and selling private sets for months or years
without anyone catching on.

I need to start some sort of neo-amishesque group and run away from tech.

~~~
nradov
It would be hilarious if dating site scammers developing chat bots end up
being the first ones to pass the Turing Test.

------
a3n
Can the same or similar techniques be used to distinguish real from generated?

Also, might this destroy the usefulness of photographic evidence?

------
John_KZ
NVidia's demo video is staggering.

------
anoplus
If this kills dating apps. I think speed dating meetups will sky rocket.

------
potiuper
Dupe:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18675371](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18675371)
(video link in comments of dupe)

------
hagreet
Startup idea: Suspect sketches using GANs

~~~
jacquesm
More likely it will end up as the opposite: fabricate a plausible accusation
based on available evidence against a specific person.

~~~
Nasrudith
If it can run through evidence arbitrarily wouldn't that imply better general
utility as a detective than a framer? "Given the available evidence and
remotely plausible suspect pool x is a way better match than y."

------
twism
I saw this a while ago and noticed how none of the darker skinned individuals
have nappy hair.

Not sure if I feel it's offensive

------
andersonrkton
Artificial Intelligence Creates Realistic Photos of People, None of Whom
Exist... yet. Let's wait a couple years until "they" start creating these
people, the next humans on Earth :)

