This person does not exist | Hacker News Reader

This person does not exist

thispersondoesnotexist.com

872 pointsbpierre236 comments

Thanks for all the upvotes! Since I made this site, people have already started to train on datasets beyond just real faces. Turns out it can disentangle pretty much any set of data.

Gwern has applied this to anime dataset https://twitter.com/gwern/status/1095131651246575616

Cyril at Google has applied it to artwork https://twitter.com/kikko_fr/status/1094685986691399681

This was to raise awareness for what a talented group of researchers made at Nvidia over the course of 2 years, the latest state of the art for GANs. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.04948.pdf (https://github.com/NVlabs/stylegan)

Rani Horev wrote up a nice description of the architecture here. https://www.lyrn.ai/2018/12/26/a-style-based-generator-archi...

Feel free to experiment with the generations yourself at a colab I made https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1IC0g2oDQenrDmwbtkKo...

I'm currently working on a project to map BERT embeddings of text descriptions of the faces directly to the latent space embedding (which is just a 512 dimensional vector). The goal is to control the image generation with sentences, once the mapping network is trained. Will definitely post on hacker news again if that succeeds. The future is now!

I love this part of the system req's (from the stylegan repo):

"One or more high-end NVIDIA GPUs with at least 11GB of DRAM. We recommend NVIDIA DGX-1 with 8 Tesla V100 GPUs."

I'm sure my wife will understand why I took out that second mortgage on our home...no problem.

Or use on the cloud, much cheaper https://cloud.google.com/nvidia/

They recommend the 8 Tesla, but would a 2080Ti work? That's not too bad. I might try this at home with my gaming pc.

I like the fact that the server returns an image directly without any HTML or other content. It makes the loading experience fun too.

How many faces are generated? This can't be real time.

Thanks! Initially, I thought about just generating a big batch and cycling through it. Then I thought it would be more dramatic if the machine was "dreaming" up a face every 2 seconds in real time. I went for the dramatic approach just so I could phrase it that way to my non-tech friends!

Are the old images discarded? It would be interesting to use these as references for hyper-realist drawings. You could have something completely authentic that could never be traced back to its source.

Oh wow so it really is. Great work

Google image search must be getting smashed by this. Is there a canonical exif tag, perhaps isBot?

Looks like someone else has already used another neural net to find our president in the latent space. https://github.com/Puzer/stylegan

That artwork demo has really piqued my interest regarding using techniques like these for creating animation more easily.

Love the work you guys are doing in the progressive GAN space. Last year I did something similar to make a face-aging network, involving training an encoder to get an initial guess of a latent vector for someones face into the pgan space, and then relied on BFGS optomization to fine-tune the latent vector, followed by further fine-tuning of some intermediary layers of the generator network to really match the input pixels. I also snuck an affine transform layer in there allowing the network to shift the image around to better fit the target.

The results were .... eh .... okay, at least on my ugly face. https://twitter.com/RustBot/status/1044120159022022658

But overall, Im still tweaking. In the mean time, I've been focusing on static image analysis for aging research, but I hope to find better encoding schemes down the road.

https://twitter.com/RustBot/status/1058607878540472320

Cool page, and great job.

> Turns out it can disentangle pretty much any set of data.

All the example I have seen (including your links) are variants of face generation algorithms. Any ideas on how this could be useful beyond image generation in some style? Specifically for (data) science?

Sorry if this is a naive question.

Edit: By "variants of face generation algorithms" I mean any image generation really.

The original Karras et al 2018 paper did both cars and cats, which aren't faces. Worked very well, unsurprisingly. (ProGAN also did well on those, though it was the faces everyone paid attention to.) Look at the samples in the paper or the Google Drive dumps, or at the interpolation videos have posted on Twitter.

Aside from the original work, on Twitter, people have done Gothic cathedrals very well, graffiti very well, fonts very well, and WikiArt oil portraits not so well. On Danbooru2017 full anime images (linked in my thread), one person has... suggestive blobs but has only put 2-3 GPU-days into it and we aren't expecting much so early into training. skylion has been running StyleGAN on a whole-body anime character dataset he has, and the results overnight (on 4 Titans) are pretty impressive but he hasn't shared anything publicly yet.

Great job on the Danbooru training! I've been following you on twitter and machinelearning for the longest time haha

Thanks! The wait on training is killing me, though. I've been doing large minibatch training to try to fix the remaining issues in the anime face StyleGAN and it's frustrating having to wait days to see clear improvement. Checking GAN samples is so addictive and undermines my ability to focus & get anything else done. I'm also eager to get started on full Danbooru image training, which I intend to initialize from skylion's model - whenever that finishes training...

(Who says we aren't compute-limited these days?!)

Haha, having to work around the computation limits are welcoming! It feels like building web apps back in the late 90's again. These days we have so much memory and disk space at hand it doesn't even feel like a challenge anymore.

That is, until Graphcore delivers their IPU.

I forgot one failure case: a few hundred/thousand 128px pixel art Pokemon sprites. StyleGAN seems to just weakly memorize them and the interpolations are jerky garbage, indicating overfitting. (No GAN has worked well on it and IMO the dataset is too small & abstract to be usable.)

no not naive at all. this method isn't specific for just extracting features from faces. it can disentangles features from any kind of images. in fact, the next dataset i might train on is on flowers (or birds)

https://twitter.com/hardmaru/status/1095639937842638849

OK, my point is what could be done beyond generating images in some style? Can we generate interesting mock data given a database for instance (of course this is exactly what you did in a way, but I have in mind e.g. a database containing some numerical/categorical features known to a specific accuracy)?

You can use GANs to generate fake data based on stuff like particle accelerator data or electronic health records. Whether you can use StyleGAN specifically is unclear. What's the equivalent of progressive growing on tabular/numeric data? Or style transfer?

Could be used to generate building plans or other schematics (pretty sure of no use though). Could certainly be put to good use generating pornographic images.

Hey, you might want to consider bert-as-service[0] for deep feature extraction from a BERT model. It will give you a 768 dimensional representation of the description, then you can embed that in the 512-dim latent space? I've been thinking of something similar.

It's not that hard to do it yourself, but it's a really clean package, and it gives you nice CLI flags for most things like pooling strategy, and what layer you want to get the activations from.

[0] https://github.com/hanxiao/bert-as-service

Some enterprising developer could use images from Tinder (or better) OkCupid tagged with data coming from the individuals profile data, then interpolate based on abstract factors such as risk taking, gender bias etc. Well... you get the picture.

I think this is a very dangerous game we are playing here but I guess it is going to be done.

@lucidrains - this is pretty amazing. Every time you refresh the page, is it a real-time generation, or does it draw from a pool/DB of real-time images generated previously? I got the exact same image twice, which is why I am asking, which kind of dampened the "cool" factor just a notch.

So does this make it trivial to input a source portrait, and then visualize different hair styles?

you'll have to build an encoder to encode someone's face into the latent space. then you'll have to dive into the latent space and find the dimension(s) that controls for hair style (just fork the colab and start experimenting with interpolations)

then yes, it should be possible

What license are the generated images under? Could you release them under creative commons?

They're probably public domain [1,2]. Generally in the USA and Europe, you can't copyright computer generated images or images created by nonhuman entities.

"To qualify as a work of 'authorship' a work must be created by a human being": https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-... [PDF], see section 313.2 "Works that lack human authorship"

Monkey selfie case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

From the Wiki article of the "Monkey Selfie Case"

>>> On 23 April, the court issued its ruling in favor of Slater, finding that animals have no legal authority to hold copyright claims [1]

[1] https://petapixel.com/2018/04/24/photographer-wins-monkey-se...

I feel this is wrong. If I make random generative art I instantly lose copyright? Or how about Photoshop? Really I'm asking myself where is the lone drawn.

You don’t “loose” copyright, you never had it in the first place.

Copyright is (read the law!) a temporary monopoly granted for works meeting certain criteria, being creative is one of them. You’d hold copyright for the code you wrote to generate the “art”. If you download somebody else’s code (as this site uses Nvidia’s), you lack the creative element.

You can though own the algorithm you used to generate the art, as in the case of Fractal Flame[0] created by Scott Draves.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_flame

more details since none were provided:

> Recently a talented group of researchers at Nvidia released the current state of the art generative adversarial network, StyleGAN, over at https://github.com/NVlabs/stylegan

> I have decided to dig into my own pockets and raise some public awareness for this technology.

> Faces are most salient to our cognition, so I've decided to put that specific pretrained model up. Their research group have also included pretrained models for cats, cars, and bedrooms in their repository that you can immediately use.

> Each time you refresh the site, the network will generate a new facial image from scratch from a 512 dimensional vector.

(https://www.facebook.com/groups/DeepNetGroup/permalink/80536...)

Googling "nvidia face generator" lead me to "A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks," (6 Feb 2019) a paper showing the faces on the site.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.04948.pdf

Code: https://github.com/NVlabs/stylegan

If you reload this page enough, you will eventually find your own face. And then things start to get weird....

Luckily the dataset is photogenic people so no danger of that for me.

Luckily the dataset is attractive people so no danger of that for me.

thatsthejoke.jpg

if we train a reverse encoder of the output of the GAN back to its own latent space, it's probably possible to find your face and mess with it.

and it seems like someone already did it as of 9 hours ago https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/aq6jxf/p_s...

I did not know what the site was and the very first image that loaded was very similar to Ross Ulbricht. With the name of the site I thought it was a page dedicated to him. Very odd.

Can I upvote this twice?

For all of these “this is a simulated face”-claims I wish they would show the 2-3 most similar faces in their training set. For all you know, it could just be spitting out a random training image. How would you know the difference?

take a look at "Figure 8" from the original paper:

https://imgur.com/a/rZsWzDa

we can smoothly interpolate between faces, so it seems impossible to me that these are just memorised from the training set

I just realized that the eyes, nose, and mouth are always in the same place in these images... even though the head might rotate around them.

That might be because they cleaned the dataset thoroughly. I vaguely recall there was something about 'facial landmarks' and alignment in the ProGAN work which was presumably carried over to StyleGAN. Doubtless helps the final quality.

However, aligned faces are definitely not required - I didn't do any kind of alignment for my anime faces and you can see the eyes/nose/mouth in all sorts of positions in the samples & videos.

This is usually done, most GAN paper show in the appendix a list of generated images with distance to images in the dataset, for example check from pages 14 to 16 in this GAN paper [1]. Note that measuring distances between images is not trivial and some measurement space must be chosen, typically cosine at the last ResNet feature map.

[1] https://openreview.net/pdf?id=B1xsqj09Fm

you can download the training set here https://github.com/NVlabs/stylegan#resources it's based on 70k high resolution flickr images. try interpolation on the colab link above so you can be convinced its capturing the features rather than just memorizing

I've been wondering what is going to happen when bots start using these images as profile pictures?

Previously it wasn't trivial to do a GAN image generator, now as this site shows it's, if not trivial, also not particularly hard.

I'm seeing some characteristic artifacts in most of these pictures. A hair halo floating just outside of the head is pretty common, and there's a sort of rainbow fringing that was very common in the deep dream postings that I'm still seeing popup...

... but all, or almost all, of these would be irrelevant at a profile pic size. At that size, assuming these aren't just recapitulations of the training data (and I assume they aren't) this technique appears to be 99%+ successful.

Also, look at the non-face stuff. Some backgrounds are just "incredibly blurred vaguely landscapy stuff", which is plenty realistic, but I've seen the algorithm attempt wood grain, which went poorly. I've seem some bizarre patchwork backgrounds, and one picture had a person cut off to the right like a single photo trimmed from a family photo, and the cut-off person was some sort of SCP-monstrosity mercifully cut off by the edge of the photo. Still, the success is impressive. The failures are definitely going from "in your face" to "easy to ignore/miss".

Fix up the training data a bit and this'd be a profile pic machine.

Every one of these pictures has something 'off' with them. But it takes a while to notice. My first three - the teeth were odd, there were small, regular rectangles out of the teeth. Then it was the eyes. Specifically the iris was the wrong shape and had too much glare from what I assume is a camera.

Every single picture, if you really look at it, is disturbing for reasons you can't pick out. It's definitely hitting the uncanny valley. It's juuuust human enough to blend, but not human enough to avoid the creeping feeling of dread.

But that being said, if I'm cruising forums and see this in a thumbnail size, I'm not going to be able to pick out that it's not a real person.

"It's definitely hitting the uncanny valley."

I'd say you're correct that it is still in it, but it is clearly climbing up the other side now. We're past the minima of verisimilitude now.

they're locally plausible but globally everything's slightly wrong: the measurements of features, the mixture between high-resolution and sudden blurriness, the occasional warping effect, the shifting perspective, the eyes don't sit in the skull correctly, the hair seems to be intersecting the forehead sometimes, every area seems to be located in a different space & there's no three-dimensional coherence to it

With some of them you notice it straight away like the woman with something sticking out of a hole in her cheek: https://fb.pics/image/38yjt and the woman with the mutilated left ear: https://fb.pics/image/380UC and the child with the adult eye bags: https://fb.pics/image/38Jva One thing it almost always does wrong is glasses. https://fb.pics/image/38NNu And apart from pictures of young children, most of them have strange vertical wrinkles under the eyes, even when everything else is relatively convincing.

I saw perfect glasses, but I've never seen perfect earrings.

Bonus points for pics of smiling grinning people with sad or angry eyes. The algorithm does not understand musculature. Eugh.

right off the bat the two photos [in each post] have some sort of artefact on the right temple, gave it away as a manipulated image on first glance. and there are halos and blur. im also wondering just how far these fakes could go? there is such high resolution with very common cameras now that the reflection of what a person is looking at is visible in the lens of thier eye. [its even a zero day] the AI is going to need someway of creating a fake setting to go with the face, and fake EXIF data that matches the fake camera model that would have taken the picture.

ever look at people. most people have something off about them and the longer you look the weirder they appear

How difficult would it be for DL to take a badly done 3d rendering, and turn it into a realistic scene?

Deep Learning AI Generates Realistic Game Graphics by Learning from Videos:

https://thenewstack.io/deep-learning-ai-generates-realistic-...

What's the practical difference between a synthetic fake profile photo and a stolen filtered real one?

Stolen ones are easier to do reverse image detection on and expose as fraudulent. I see this a lot on Twitter - bots pull a mix of stolen profile pics, bios, etc.

Speed of content generation. You can create thousands of synth ones a second.

Since it uses a deep neural network, I don't think it's "thousands a second". Also, you can download an image and crop a face out of it in several seconds. You could even automate the process.

The biggest problem is transferring faces to existing photos. It was hard to do manually. Now it's much easier. Also, people are generally trained to ignore various artifacts by CGI-ridden movies and compression algorithms. So much of our notion of how the world looks comes from digital imagery, it's kind of scary.

I think we need to change the threshold of quality for an image/video to constitute "proof" of any kind. You can hide most of the weird artifacts by scaling things down or passing them through heavy compression.

> Since it uses a deep neural network, I don't think it's "thousands a second".

The generator is like 150MB. The forward pass is <0.1s. Hypothetically you should be able to generate on a decent GPU like a 1080ti with 11GB VRAM at full utilization <730 images per second. Use a few GPUs and you're at thousands per second.

Where is this data from? I see 300MB model on their Google Drive. And if I understand correctly, you also need source and destination images to transfer styles from and to, so it's not like the model generates photos out of thin air.

The 300MB model covers both the G and D. You only need G to generate. The style transfer is just noise. And I time my own 512px anime StyleGANs at ~21 images per second per model; half that throughput to account for the increased model size and depth of a 1024px. No matter how you tweak the numbers - halve it again if you wish! - it's clear that thousands per second is entirely attainable with a few GPUs at low cost. (For comparison, 8 V100s is ~$7/hr on AWS; 10x1080ti is ~$1.3/hr on Vast.ai.)

Possibly ethics and law (personal rights to the photo)?

I should hope not!

https://imgur.com/a/ptgKbh1

The presentation is very interesting. That's always what amazes my with those GAN outputs. These people do not actually exist. Obviously, there are some funky examples. Nothing wrong with mine at first, although his buddy should probably see a doctor: https://imgur.com/a/dkS8Ux5

I noticed that whenever there was more than one person, or something touched the face, the results looks horrific.

Yep, scary stuff :O https://imgur.com/PIOlhOu

The Accidental Teratoma Compendium

Some result are nauseating examples of uncanny valley at its best (or worst)!

Found Martin Short's brother

https://imgur.com/a/2iA7t3N

Mine did a circle game on me but when I tried to download it I got another image.

A Lorem Ipsum for faces... It looks like a great way to build an employee profile page for a site.

What's funny is "Like Lorem Ipsum, but for people" is the tagline for randomuser.me, which currently uses stock photos with random user data. Combine these 2 and you got yourself a party.

Run it several billion times, create an Earth-sized social network, then give it content with a meme generation system like Dank Learning https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.04510

i never miss an opportunity to link to this wonderful startup generator http://tiffzhang.com/startup/

Facum Ipsum sounds like an entertaining side-project. Coupling one of these images with a random profile generator for each employee and outputting to JSON. One button press would populate your app with relevant data.

+ https://www.fakenamegenerator.com

Interesting that the Vehicle Record lists cars that are only available in Europe and Asia despite generating exclusively US addresses/personas.

Related: the technology behind this has a harder time with cats than it does people, and the results are hilarious:

http://aiweirdness.com/post/182633984547/gancats

People keep saying this'd be great for fake profile photos, but seems to me that's not realistic yet, at least not as demonstrated here.

A social media profile with a single picture is pretty suspicious.

To be convincing you'd need a steady stream of pictures of the "same" fictitious person, doing typical social media thing -- selfies with friends, vacation pics, appearances in other peoples' pictures, etc.

Not necessarily, If you're talking about platforms like LinkedIn where people hardly change their profile pic.

In the right context you'd have no reason to doubt some of the good ones from this set is a real person.

I almost never post selfies. They're pretty rare among most of the people I follow, too. Some people like being in front of the camera, some don't.

This is literally the first AI image processing project I've seen posted here that actually shows high resolution images.

Every single other one I've seen has a bunch of tiny low res thumbnails on a github page that serve to completely obscure any potential artifacts or issues with the system.

(I could clone their code and run it, but that's not the output that any of the discussion they've prompted is operating on, and that's kind of the point of hacker news).

So thanks for doing the bare minimum for an image processing project, finally.

Most of the projects you're thinking of probably never even generated high-resolution images. Until recently, the actual output layer for most of these systems would be something like a 256x256 array of pixels.

Bare minimum, how come? Most standardized image processing datasets have very low resolution images.

Yes, my point is that that is not good enough.

Two problems that I can see:

1. What use cases are there for a photo processing algorithm that only spits out tiny thumbnails?

2. If it can output higher resolution images, why are all of the examples tiny thumbnails? You can hide a lot of otherwise obvious flaws with a tiny thumbnail.

Because of computing power issues - training a good model with a significantly higher resolution becomes a lot more expensive. If you're doing a proof of concept or analyzing algorithms, you stick to lower resolutions; at larger resolutions the algorithm (and its effects) are the same, but you just need ten or hundred or thousand times more hardware and/or time.

GAN creating faces purely at the pixel level still seems a strange approach to me. In some years it will feel very restrictive. I guess it's the only tractable method at the moment.

Is anyone working on a GAN to generate bone structure then flesh and skin/mouth/eyes textures and pipe the result in a ray tracer?

It's incredible what can be done in 2D solving directly for the result, but imagine where this goes when this works in volume and multiple levels more driven by physics.

I guess finding training data for bone structure, flesh, and skin textures is harder than finding pictures of faces...

Oddly, one's bone structure likely possesses more intrinsic privacy protections despite being, arguably, less personally identifiable than one's face.

Of course, this is also why training data is more difficult to acquire, as you mention.

Wouldn't being less personally identifiable mean it also offers more privacy protection?

He means that there are rules preventing the data from being shared, making it harder to find a training set.

Upon further reflection, my observation's mostly a straw man. HIPAA covers a patient's face when a dermatologist takes an image just as a x-ray covers a bone structure.

Privacy is hard to talk and reason about without defining everything specifically.

This projects images were sourced from Flickr. You can find medical imagery on Flickr reasonably easy as well it turns out.

That defeats the purpose. The purpose of deep learning is to let the machine solve the problem using only goal data. If you are going to program it with bones and flesh models then you don't need a neural net.

I disagree. If the purpose is simply to get a single-use photograph, then yes. But for this type of application I think we want to create a virtual human that can, at the very least, be photographed from two different angles and ideally put into motion. To create an virtual entity.

You wouldn't "program" it with flesh and bones, you would generate a life-like but original new skeleton in the same way we generate these images, except the space of solution is the space of possible skeletons instead of possible pixel configurations. And then generate soft tissues that are also original, conforming to biology constraints and also constrained by the underlying skeleton. Same for skin, created from scratch but believable and driven by the underlying tissue.

But what if you can train other feature lines that will generate backgrounds and other humans? Then add in another feature line that can morph an existing human line into different views, poses and/or animations.

With enough training data, I would think you could create alternate views from the first view via ML methods, rather than doing skeletal structure by ML and then physics modeling to get views.

Yes, the next step is 3D:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HO1LYJb818Q

*This person is a composite of several people who do exist

I hear ya... Don't you think you're stretching the meaning of the words "composite" and "several" a little far though?

Asking as an ML layman, isn't it mixing something like 6 maybe 10 features of different people?

With tens of thousands of training images, and hundreds of dimensions in the latent space, I don't think I would assume this is true. You may be thinking one feature is "eyes", but the eyes may instead be built out of 10 sub-features. Those sub-features may be inextricably linked to other, identifiable, macro-features.

Maybe, maybe not. GANs are not necessarily interpretable so it's not easy to know the answer to your question.

But how synthetic are they? I.e., what does the "most similar", however you define it, sample in the training set look like?

Good question! I'm guessing not very synthetic, with high similarity to examples in the training set.

This issue is covered in this Two Minute Papers video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ct_P3IZow0 (relevant section around 2:27)

Hmm, it does babies and infants too. I was not expecting that.

Other commentators mention that Ashley Madison, stock-photo companies, and other spammers will take this and run with it. Honestly, I suspect that has already happened for a while now and may explain the issues that FB and Twitter are having [0].

Though I can't find the thread, there was a discussion here on HN a while back about the 'Inversion' issue. Briefly, Youtube uses some ML and RNN stuff to help determine spammers vs. real-people (after pre-processing and cleaning things up a fair bit). However, if the number of spammers becomes too high, such that the spammers that DO make it through the various filters become over 51%, then the filters will 'Invert'. Meaning that the MLs and RNNs will start to classify the spammers as 'real' and the real-people will likely be told they are spammers.

I can imagine that this site will quickly exacerbate that issue.

Honestly, in reading Cal Newport's new book [1], I can't say I'm all that sad about it. The 'casino' like design of the modern web is obviously bad for us. In moderation, yes, but to the level we are at currently? Not a chance. Driving users away from these sites and devices isn't a bad thing for anyone that isn't earning a paycheck via the FAANGs.

Hopefully this kind of tech will cause a bit of a restructuring of the modern web in the long haul. I doubt it, but one can hope.

[0] Not that Jack can even properly use twitter to begin with: https://danluu.com/karajack/

[1] http://calnewport.com/blog/

I'm waiting for the time where all this neural technology will start to be used for something good, like making better games with more NPCs who can really talk. Maybe never. The life-cycle seems to be research -> malicious use -> hipster nonsense -> memes -> abandonment.

Edit: the problems with these images look very much like application of anisotropic smoothing. G'MIC has filters like that. You can make this stuff look more realistic by blurring it (gaussian) and adding noise (uniform). Blurring hides small-scale irregularities, while noise makes blurring less obvious by adding small-scale "grains" that you perceive as detail/texture.

Things do get applied. If you want applications of GANs to better games, did you notice the past few weeks discussion of using ESRGAN & other superresolution GANs to upscale artwork of old games to make them far prettier and highres?

I was thinking more along the lines of an RPG with generated town population. Indie devs usually don't have resources to draw hundreds of portraits and record tends of hours of dialog, but if they could use ML to generate portraits and synthesize decent speech, it would allow them to create much bigger, more immersive worlds.

Also, this stuff could be used to take a hand-drawn portrait and animate it with different expressions without rework.

"The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed." Stuff like that will come, eventually. Like any cutting-edge R&D, there's a long valley of death from a lab demo to a globalized real-world product. It's a lot of work to package things up so reliably & cleanly that harried game devs can easily & usefully incorporate them into games.

>Stuff like that will come, eventually.

Well, I'm not so sure. On one hand, games use graphics techniques that were developed couple years prior to their development. On the other hand, they fail to capitalize even on relevant AI research of the 60s and 80s. When they do, it looks amazing (e.g. FEAR AI), but it's very rare.

The excuse I always hear is that those techniques might be smarter but not as fun. That doesn't appear near as applicable to graphics stuff, where game developers have always been eager to apply and extend the cutting edge.

The FEAR AI is actually simpler than you might think, though with some really good insights in term of applying behavioral design to gameplay. https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~jorkin/gdc2006_orkin_jeff_fear...

> As much as we like to pat ourselves on the back, and talk about how smart our A.I. are, the reality is that all A.I. ever do is move around and play animations! Think about it. An A.I. going for cover is just moving to some position, and then playing a duck or lean animation. An A.I. attacking just loops a firing animation. Sure there are some implementation details; we assume the animation system has key frames which may have embedded messages that tell the audio system to play a footstep sound, or the weapon system to start and stop firing, but as far as the A.I.’s decision-making is concerned, he is just moving around or playing an animation.

> Now let’s look at our complex behaviors. The truth is, we actually did not have any complex squad behaviors at all in F.E.A.R. Dynamic situations emerge out of the interplay between the squad level decision making, and the individual A.I.’s decision making, and often create the illusion of more complex squad behavior than what actually exists!

> Imagine we have a situation similar to what we saw earlier, where the player has invalidated one of the A.I.’s cover positions, and a squad behavior orders the A.I. to move to the valid cover position. If there is some obstacle in the level, like a solid wall, the A.I. may take a back route and resurface on the player’s side. It appears that the A.I. is flanking, but in fact this is just a side effect of moving to the only available valid cover he is aware of.

Yes, I've read that.

Brb, going to train a GAN with all my selfies so it can generate new selfies.

As this stuff gets better and better, I wonder if it will actually increase our distrust in digital imagery and in doing so, increase the demand for in person interaction, at least in matters of consequence.

Either that, or digital communication will have to include defensive fake detection features, and the rest of that thought is a Philip K Dick novel ;)

Photos have been faked since the beginning of photography. Mathew Brady (famous for photographing the American Civil War) moved dead bodies to stage shots, had live soldiers lie down and pretend to be dead, etc.

Agreed, but the difference today is the scale.

Absolutely, and the ease of creating a convincing fake.

Note: I'm not trying to be an ass, or start a fight, I'm literally just asking...

Does it only generate white people? I've been refreshing for a while but don't see any people of color.

Edit: No, I finally got someone who wasn't white, it just seems to have a helluva bias.

The dataset is compiled from flickr portraits, and the model was trained to generate sampels from that distribution, so there will definitely be bias towards the sort of people whose portraits end up on flickr. Per the paper:

>The images were crawled from Flickr (thus inheriting all the biases of that website) and automatically aligned and cropped. Only images under permissive licenses were collected. Various automatic filters were used to prune the set, and finally Mechanical Turk allowed us to remove the occasional statues, paintings, or photos of photos.

It's still much more diverse than previous datasets (which used U.S. celebrity photos), but would require some additional work to match the actual world population distribution.

Second one I got was an Indian man.

I used my anime face StyleGAN to make a similar website: http://www.thiswaifudoesnotexist.net/index.html

Advertising companies are going to be stoked that they don't have to pay real to model anymore. Stock photos especially.

Not as stoked as "blockchain" ICO scammers will be that they don't have to steal pictures for their "staff" pages anymore.

And yet, every few page refreshes or so... "I'm in love".

I'm in love with this toupee. https://imgur.com/a/EnkHWnc

I had a similar one ... and yet, not quite enough to outright convince me it was a fake. Because some people do wear weird hats and toupees.

The generator couldn't decide whether it's drawing hair or a hat, so it sort of did both.

oh man, that is funny. took me a second to see what is going on there.

There was a study done on faces and beauty. They created faces based on global averages of features and found these (synthetically invented) faces to rank even more highly on the beauty scale.

Are all of these nonexistent people of consensual age though?

I've never read any benchmarks around render time on sophisticated GANs, so maybe the answer to this is obvious, but: Is this showing a random selection from a set of offline-generated images, or is the GAN actually generating these on each request?

This is what always bothers me about demonstrations of the technology. There's almost always a extra hidden layer of human curation of the output so we only see the examples that are most interesting (90% amazing result with a mixture of hilarious/horrible bad results for flavor)

This work is impressive, I don't mean to take anything away from it, but if the author had to filter through 1000 images to select the 5 I saw, that's ... disappointing?

It's definitely not generating an image for each page load. If you refresh the page you get the same image more often than you get a new image.

It looks like there is just throttling on requests, if you request a new one too quickly, it will just give you the same one

It's constantly generating new images and serves always the freshest one.

The author posted elsethread to say that it is generating a new image every 2 seconds, and serving the latest one.

It's worth noting that although at a first glance the face looks extremely realistic, there are some details that don't quite make sense and hint at a randomly-generated face.

This is what I got: https://i.imgur.com/iCfzjkZ.jpg

In no specific order:

- weird hair above the person's right eye, that doesn't match with the overall hairstyle (the patch of short hair) or realistic hair behaviour (straight bit of hair)

- what seems like beard on the chin, with unrealistic lighting

- hair turns into leaves at the bottom

- weird reflex in the left glass

- mismatching shapes for glasses (there's a small bump only on the right glass)

Hrm, your example was quite glaring in its flaws, most of the images I saw, on the other hand, looked quite flawless. I actually came here to disagree with someone else who stated the images he saw had alien-like alarming characteristics, or something along those lines. I can’t tell most of these are fake even at full size on an XS Max.

There are some weird and disturbing artifacts if in one of the composite images, the person was touching their face: https://imgur.com/a/ptgKbh1

More disturbing examples: https://imgur.com/a/UoaYha8

Also a LOT more in this subreddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/SyntheticNightmares/

It's also worth noting that a couple of years ago, most GAN-generated faces looked obviously wrong at 128x128px. It's entirely plausible that this approach is ultimately a dead end, but it's also plausible that we're at a crucial inflection point in the development of computing.

I noticed that there's generally odd texturing and hair placement. Wrinkles on an otherwise smooth face, or in weird places / directions. Hair of a mismatched color. The unusual facial texturing seems to occur more on the right side of these images.

- hair turns into leaves at the bottom

Clearly, this algorithm has captured a dryad.

Most of them are CLOSE but still pretty Uncanny Valley, then there's https://i.imgur.com/A2ThWBE.jpg which was...shocking to say the least. Crazy how far this stuff has come though, and how many more applications it has. Also interesting how the oddities of the images look a lot like how some of the visual effects of psychedelics manifest. Hair blending into an ear, the lines around the eyes trailing off, the "hairiness" of some of them, and of course the nightmare fuel I linked above.

The teeth seem to be the give-away. There seems to be a bias of having the two top front incisors facing the camera, even when the head is turned.

Glasses seem to do weird things, especially if they're frameless.

I wonder why it doesn't generate any people with African features

It does, I got this image: https://i.imgur.com/oSh8DsS.jpg

I got one after about 15 tries. Also a person with Indian features and Hispanic features.

I got numerous.

Looks like a perfect tool for generating profile photos for troll bots. TinEye will soon no longer be able to help us.

Wouldn’t it be possible to add a real human feedback on each face presented on thisisnotaperson.com, in the form of a simple button « Fake » « Not fake » that would help the disciminator in its analysis with thousands of inputs?

This is a strong, clickbaity claim, which seems quite hard to prove :)

But seriously: it may be essential for legal reasons to be 100% sure that an automatically generated face does in fact not depict a real-life person.

No more than it is essential to be 100% sure that a painting does not depict a real-life person.

A painting is usually immediately recognizable as a work of art / fiction. Do you want to appear as a team member on an escort service site which uses automatically generated placeholder images to protect their employees? Do you want your face on a billboard ad for Viagra?

There is a huge difference between "hey, that painting looks like you" and "hey, that is a photograph of you".

That almost certainly isn't needed for a project like this, but I wonder if it would be needed to try to make money off this. It might be like the whole "The events depicted in this movie are fictitious..." warning you see at the end of almost every movie regardless of it is some realistic and plausible story or if it something like Avatar.

Why? Is it illegal to look like someone else? I look like my sister and my dad.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/11/spanish-mp-fbi...

This will soon get good enough to be indistinguishable from real faces. What's more, there will be collisions with real faces too, which could be amusing or disturbing when it triggers a conflict.

Very interesting. I'm sure this technology will get better. It's in its infancy.

But what's "off" to me about these pictures are the eyes, every single picture. I don't get that feeling of human connection. In some of the pictures, the "person" has two different eyes. In some others, the eyes just make me feel sick to my stomach if I look at them. They're "off" at best and super creepy at worst.

That being said, as others have pointed out, in profile pic size I'm sure I couldn't tell.

It's the uncanny valley in action! About 80% of these faces look a bit off to me but some of the others I find really hard to tell it's a fake.

So is now not the time for me to be starting my modeling career then?

biggest weakness of this system seems to be generating realistic backgrounds, the faces look amazing - but around the edges some photos appear to "swirl" with the background

Some of these have really odd and interesting errors https://imgur.com/a/oFBqRws

That last one is funny. Basically: expect anyone photographed at this angle to be wearing one of those TED-talk wireless microphone things usually. Rendered probabilistically?

Really cool stuff, but aside from the obvious nightmare fuel stuff downthread, there's often still some interesting artifacts. I doubt I'd have noticed them before reading a medium piece on the subject, but they are there: https://medium.com/@kcimc/how-to-recognize-fake-ai-generated....

This guy wants to sell me a SaaS

https://imgur.com/a/pTOZto4

The heterochromia and slit pupils are really what sell me on the product...

Not to go all Black-Mirror here, but imagine training a model based on individualized user preferences to generate some sort of idyllic "person", leveraged for surreptitious advertising. For instance, analyzing what kind of Instagram models one engages with regularly and using that data to generate individualized "influencers". Just a thought :)

I feel like there's probably already a department at Alphabet working on this.

this is quite disturbing: https://imgur.com/JkBte93

This is likely drawing from the set of pre-generated faces. If so it is violating the attribution requirement of the license.

(Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International) https://drive.google.com/open?id=1TKGTq6XgMBzA29EfOGD6RB9jjP...

Are you sure? I would think the pre-generated list would weed out the obviously incorrect/malformed ones that you sometimes get.

Karras et al 2018 dumped a random sample, not a screened sample. (This avoids cherrypicking accusations.)

Agreed, I got the EXACT same image twice, so I think that must be what is happening.

I apologize if this is a silly question but could someone provides some context for what this site is a demonstration of?

Hmm. You could take a subset of photos, label them on attractiveness, figure out the vector for your personal sense of human aesthetic, and then generate pictures of people that you specifically find beautiful. Sounds like a good business idea for... uh... ads.

(Or a service that makes you prettier in social media photos. Yay dystopia!)

Found one with a microphone embedded in their cheek. Another with half a pair of glasses embedded in an eye socket.

Awesome job. any chance of adding a filter for Gender or Age?

e.g. https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/?$gender=Male&MinAge=30&M...

The first 3 I viewed were all incredible except for a weird little flaw around the edge of the hair/background line, first 2 had an unnatural notch out of their hair and the third was a weird discolouration/thinning of hair.

There's often some issues around hair, glasses, and... other people in frame. https://imgur.com/2CjLFEP

Absolutely awesome! Some faces seem to have some weird horizontal asymmetry, though (I'm not saying that people are perfectly symmetric, but in these pictures the two halves of the face seem to belong to different people).

The first time I heard of GAN's creating faces of people who never existed was from the show "Person of interest", where the "machine"(an AI) creates a face and assigns it to its identity.

I have got a clone of the original site.. check it out https://thispersondoesnotexist.scholarguider.com

Is there any service that let's you pay to play with GANs? I have some art projects but don't want to go through the trouble of setting it all up. Certainly someone would rent me their GPUs?

AWS has GPU instances - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/dlami/latest/devguide/gpu.html

So does Google with collab, right?

I could use those but was hoping for something more turnkey.

I've had a small (nerdy) dream of converting current generation Pokemon sprites into older palette and size constrained sprites using techniques similar to this.

Anyone have any suggestions on how I might start?

This image generator does not understand the concept of earrings. Or stretched earlobes with plugs in them. Now and then I get a person who has these weird jewel-sores on their cheeks.

Kinda nifty.

Spent some good minutes on this. Scary as hell. Thx for sharing it

Uh, somebody want to explain this to us riff-raff? All I see is a web page that generates faces. No menus, no "About", nada. WTF is going on?

Either his GANN hasn't figured out that people's front teeth are usually symmetrically identical or I only know people with good dentists.

I got the same exact face twice, so what's the deal? Is this not real-time generation and just grabbed from some pre-generated face database?

Could be improved by "This person does not exist... and never has before."

Some might just think they are deceased with the current title.

I only looked at a few. I was afraid I was going to see a woman and have love at first sight and be forever heartbroken.

This looks like it will be extremely useful for people generating plausible-looking Twitter sock puppet accounts.

Interesting to imagine this as an npc generator in a vr video game. I could imagine that feeling pretty lifelike

One thing I think I noticed is that the children's faces have older looking skin than would be expected.

Ted was right.

When there's another person on the side, their face is really messed up for some reason.

Ears always give it away. In every single picture I got so far the ears are malformed.

If a generated ”random” person happen to be identical with a real person then you must say the person exist. It’s very likely that some images describe real people and therefore the domain name makes no sense. Like if a process happened to generate a real equation it’s not the case that the equation doesn’t exist.

Simultaneously the coolest and most frightening thing I've seen. Good work.

Seriously, these photos are really creeping me out. They've _almost_ escaped uncanny valley but the little details (wonky ears, unnatural hair, weird artifacts) make them super creepy.

The worst I've gotten is this guy: https://imgur.com/A2SsmVn. He's mostly normal but some glitch (presumably a partial pair of glasses) makes it look like his robot face mask is coming unpeeled. Extremely unsettling.

EDIT: Holy crap, I might have found one worse. This woman is smiling away as her mutated hand stabs a piece of glass into her face and I am so uncomfortable: https://imgur.com/z6UKVWn

More creepy photos: https://old.reddit.com/r/SyntheticNightmares/

That second one is terrifying! Did someone feed the system thalidomide and PCP or what? Some of them though, if I didn’t know I was looking for flaws, I would probably never think twice about them being humans.

So how long before we have a dataset to say if an image was generated or not?

There's at least one doppelganger that looks exactly like you in the world. It's interesting to think that some of these GAN rendered images of people could actually be people that exist in the real world.

Yeah, clearly. It showed me a boy with widespread stubble.

Well there goes the Image Turing Test....

Would this work with ASCII-art faces?

Ashley Madison should acquire this tech.

What kind of viral marketing campaign is this for?

Some ML face generator I assume

You aren't killing them as we click the photos, are you?

You joke but the first image I got was a Chinese looking guy. I was expecting to scroll and see a story about how he "disappeared".

ha ha, classic.

No, only when you unload the page.

GANs are fascinating, but I'd love to see a post-processing effect that removes some of the pixel fringe created during GAN composition.

Why doesn't this show up on the main page? It has 696 upvotes in 18 hours! It's not on the main page, it's not on Show HN.

This would be so much cooler and useful if you could generate several pictures of the same person in different angles/lighting.

Can you get multiple photos of a "person"?

Yes. You can take a particular latent point and generate slight variants of it. You could also apply different style/noises to change the overall appearance like orientation. Take a look at the StyleGAN paper's figures, the StyleGAN video, or the various interpolation videos people have made.

Looking to fill out your dating profile?

Please add a way to share a generated face.

These people all definitely exist. The algorithm is breaking up photographs of real faces and recombining them. It’s portrait soup.

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