
Portraits of Imaginary People - michael_nielsen
http://mtyka.github.io/machine/learning/2017/06/06/highres-gan-faces.html
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cyberferret
My wife is a portrait artist, and when she usually does a commissioned
portrait for someone, I am astounded by the amount of time that she spends
purely working on the eyes. (ex. [1],[2])

Looking at these in comparison to her work, it is definitely true that the
eyes are the windows into the soul, and define a LOT about a person's face.
(Or even an animal - she does pet portraits too).

Even in looking at her very early work in art school - I can forgive the odd
crooked nose or askew mouth as long as the eyes tell the story.

Looking at these AI generated portraits, I find the facial features really
interesting, but it is the artificial, dead quality of the eyes that make me
somewhat uncomfortable with them, and induce a slight feeling of horror, as
exceptional as the artwork is.

[1] -
[https://www.instagram.com/p/BRhU7fKjdhS/](https://www.instagram.com/p/BRhU7fKjdhS/)

[2] -
[https://www.instagram.com/p/BRZormMDyB3/](https://www.instagram.com/p/BRZormMDyB3/)

~~~
serhei
The most interesting thing about the procedurally-generated portraits (and
earlier work on other generated art [1]) is that the the results completely
squick out some people while other people don't seem to notice what the
problem is and think we'll be drowning in 4k procedurally-generated Ghibli
movies on Netflix in a few decades from now (see [2]). Clearly the two groups
are looking at the pictures in two completely different ways.

(Personally, I tend to fall into the 'squicked out' category. I don't like the
way objects in [1] melt into each other, like the artist is a lobotomy patient
who can no longer separate objects, or like the picture is depicting a hideous
Lovecraftian fractal dimension.

The faces are actually better because the author iteratively upscales
something that looks like a face at every stage, instead of just running one
step to generate an alien blob of too many eyes and noses that happens to pass
the neural network. Besides dead eyes, they tend to suffer from the problem of
the two halves of the face trying to make completely different expressions.)

[1] - [https://research.googleblog.com/2015/06/inceptionism-
going-d...](https://research.googleblog.com/2015/06/inceptionism-going-deeper-
into-neural.html)

[2] -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14510453](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14510453)

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shaunrussell
This is super creepy to me, like faces from another dimension making contact.
Also reminds me of artist self portraits while on drugs.

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b0rsuk
I love the dream-like quality these faces have, even the "ugly" ones. They
look like something out of Baldur's Gate and somehow make my imagination spin.
Do you know how the effect is called ? I've experienced the same thing when
looking at screenshots from Elemental: War of Magic (but it was hit and miss)
and world map in Shroud of Avatar (the new project of Richard Garriott, the
designer of Ultima serries... I think it's finished now).

Note I don't intend to promote any of the above games except BG. I just have a
soft spot for this style of graphics.

~~~
kbart
Heh, my first idea too was "these portraits would look awesome in RPG".
Furthermore, automatically generated art could help indie game creators, as
such games often suffer from generic looks and hiring real artists is usually
over the budget.

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welpwelp
Sometimes I wonder at the uniqueness of each individual's face. It just amazes
me how everybody, no matter how numerous we have, has a different face. With
the exception of twins and non-familial coincidental twins.

~~~
wyager
Practically speaking, every face has to communicate, what, 20 bits of
information, to avoid common doppelgängers via the birthday paradox? Probably
even more. Very interesting.

People have proposed leveraging this to generate unique avatars, since you can
just pick some random parameters for the arrangement of a stick figure face
and it will probably look unique.

~~~
Capt-RogerOver
Openface (probably state-of-the-art currently? If I haven't missed anything)
uses a 128-dimensional unit hypersphere to represent a face identity. They
have likely optimized this, so it's the dimensionality that works well in
practice, not too large, not too small. It's perhaps a bit bigger than it has
to be, but it cannot be too big either because that would very likely lead to
overfitting. So that's 128*sizeof(float) = 512bytes = 4096 bits of
information. Kinda like an RSA private key :).

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pier25
I find these images fascinating, specially the parts were the textures blend
with the faces. It feels like we are watching the world through another mind,
so to speak.

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m3kw9
Horror show

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FrozenVoid
Lacks bilateral symmetry, otherwise quite realistic.

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santaclaus
Looks like concept portrait art for a Bioware game.

