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Comment by karanlyons | Hacker News Reader

A lot of these look like children. Nowhere in the article is it mentioned that a lot of these look like children. No one in the comments has brought up that a lot of these look like children. A lot of these look like children.

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This seems like a very common sentiment regarding anime especially among white people in America. I think the reason for that is partly stylistic choices of anime but if we are really honest, Japanese people if not many Asian peoples appear as children to white people. This of course seems mostly visual/aesthetically based, a similar but opposite disposition towards black people exists in America[0]. Japanese animators draw characters that emulate characteristics they find familiar, which makes sense, and thus they appear "childish" to Americans.

I could bring up old racial stereotypes regarding Asian people to further bolster this point but I think most people are aware of this.

[0] https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2014/03/black-boys-o...

You must be new to Japanese culture.

Note that this isn't actual Japanese culture; it's made by an SF-based game studio [https://sizigistudios.com/] for an expo in LA [http://www.anime-expo.org/].

However, much of the training data is likely to be of Japanese origin.

There's a pretty simple reason: it's irrelevant to the subject of the article.

I don't know danbooru, but on another nsfw japanese comic site, 11500 of the 61973 english translated works are tagged as lolicon. Majority of the remaining are teenagers at best (because most anime are in a high school setting).

So you're not crazy. These are really young looking. It is probably just representative of the dataset. The dataset itself wasn't chosen for any malicious reason, the people who like this stuff just happen to be very prolific artists so there's a machine learning scale amount of it.

Danbooru requires one to have a 'gold' account to see pictures tagged as lolicon or shotacon. That's a $20 one-time purchase. It's not clear to me that they are using such an account.

They used an open dataset (danbooru2018) which was scraped with a gold account.

Worth noting that according to the stats listed, neither lolicon nor shotacon make it into the top 19 tags.

In this artistic style, any character appearance would get more child-like characteristics. It's more of a feature of the overall "childish" view of the world associated with this style rather than an attempt to picture actual children.

Of course, it's just my perception and your interpretation may be different.

What did you learn today?

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