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Furthermore, I'd go so far as to say that the reason these faces "feel" weird sometimes is that your mind is reconstructing the structure of the fictitious persons' bodies and warning you that they have bones that are misshapen and lumps under their eyes, and teeth that point strangely, etc.

A biological response might be "misshapen eye ... likely parasite detected, avoid this person" or "mismatched emotional cues ... likely brain damage / person unpredictable, avoid"

Getting glasses for the first time at an adult age can have a similar distorting effect on facial perception for the first few months.

> likely parasite detected, avoid this person

Definitely the case for this guy https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19216620/0...

There no parasite that causes facial deformities, and mismatched emotional cues are a fundamental part of humour/acting. It makes as much sense to rationalise the unbidden disgust at unexpected facial structure with disease justifications as it does for the far more likely “person appears to have been damaged during youth/juvenile period by violent/poor nutrition & is of a low social class”.

Thanks for leading a vanguard of anti-racism against deepfakes.

Moving your left eye, nose, mouth, and right ear independently of each other is fundamental to acting?

"Unexpected" is a milder term than "never before seen on a human seen, nor interpolated".

> Thanks for leading a vanguard of anti-racism against deepfakes.

Buddy, I appreciate it. You know how hard it is when you’re surrounded by doofuses who can’t even read well enough to tell the difference between race and class and who don’t even understand how to read in good faith much less do it, and stomp all over themselves trying to epic own people with ‘facts’ that are just straw men created from their flawed understanding of existence outside of their bubble? It’s tough, not gonna lie.

I think your point is that people will recognize these faces as not being real, or maybe at least feel like they are "off" in some way, but can't put their finger on it...

That being said, if you scroll through thousands of these, what you are saying does happen often, but even more often, the faces look completely real and I would have no problem believing they were anything but.

Maybe I missed your point though....

It used to be easy by comparing reflection on eyes - one was completely different than the other. Or teeth line. I can see they've improved it a lot. I can't tell the difference now.

Just about all of these images have a characteristic "swirl" somewhere. Weird ears and eartings, impossible hair textures, confused "hats" and nightmarish hands/other faces in the image are also clear tells, but that little swirl is usually there even in otherwise "perfect" images.

I wonder what causes it.

It's hard to learn high frequency gradients. It's easy to learn a single edge, but not a large pile of overlapping gradients like the ends of hair.

I don't know why it's so common to have an arbitrary nonsense "sticker" on a face though, I wonder if it's because input photos were trunacted at edges and the learner tried to model the edge as a facial feature instead of pruning it's knowledge to a safe interior of the photo.

The Matrix of course!

> [...] the faces look completely real and I would have no problem believing they were anything but.

I suppose that depends on who the viewer is. For example, everyone at work was blown away with how hard it was to pick the real face here: http://www.whichfaceisreal.com/index.php

However, I went through about 50 in under a minute and got every one correct.

Programmers spend their time thinking in abstractions and models, rather than appreciating things as they are, as an artist must (see Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain -- https://www.drawright.com/theory). I wouldn't be surprised if more artsy types have a much easier time recognizing these fake photos, despite all the component pieces roughly being where they should be.

Funny how 95% of the time the most obvious "wrong" thing is unrealistic teeth, teeth have just as much variety as hair and skin but the fake ones all have this mannequin style bridgework (spoken as the son of a dentist)

For me I figured out how to get 100% just looking at the backgrounds, the fake images have monochrome backgrounds or subtle artifacts.

If you scrolled through thousands of actual stock photos I'm sure you'd find plenty that seem "off" in some way. Those just cost a lot more.

Is my observation correct that this is most apparent when the face is not perfectly perpendicular to the display? I feel like even some tiny fraction of a degree, and I sense something is not quite right, while the images that seem most believable are perfectly perpendicular to the display.

Is it also difficult to get the face to align with the teeth? Nearly all of their pearly whites feel eerily disconnected to me.

That was my impression as well! It looks like those projects where a kid did the initial sketch and a skilled artist did a photo-real rendering.

That seems to be an artifact of 3D model being non-existent, so all the projected angles are wrong unless the output angle matches the common input angle.

Convolutional neural nets work operate on low level structure and do high-level structure largely by stacking together low-level structural processing.

The "right way" to do high-level structure for images is a fruitful active area of investigation which I expect will probably be tackled in the next 18 months.

>18 months.

Bold prediction. I wouldn't be surprised if this is an open problem in 18 years.

I'll go further:

For each problem there are a few sub-problems and a "right way" to do each of them where a "right way" corresponds to an algorithm which efficiently tackles some element of the implicit structure of the problem.

I think within 5 years we will have made great progress on algorithmically discovering these "right ways" across many problem domains. I think both differentiable neural architecture search[0] and the MAML with implicit gradients[1] stuff is very interesting from this perspective.

[0]https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.13577

[1]https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.04630

I don't think it's possible to do without learning a hidden 3D model from 2D data.

It's nonsense to learn 2D projections directly from 2D projections, because small errors in the 2D projection can become catastrophic errors in the 3D model that humans use to interpret a 2D photo.

Learn maybe. But its easy to construct 3d information from 2d observations. See structure from motion, shape from shadow, Voxel carving, and even orbit determination.

Also as a starving artist who isn't starving because I have a non-artist job, I agree wholeheartedly. I've also done some research into this and capsule networks are the closest SOTA we have to solving this problem. There isn't any 2D projections of 3D space work with these networks AFAIK, but the purpose and intuition points in this direction.

Also, quality data is always the hard part here, so we might be able to bootstrap some of this structure learning with 3D models created for games, projected as 2D, and use that as transfer learning somehow.

In a sense, 3D models are the ultimate compression of 2D information, and therefore the most amenable of 2D transfer learning?

They are many models that are capable of generating 3D faces even from single photos.

For example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX8AIRsFmTA

or use the rotation of a real face as a guide:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1b5aiTrGzY

it's not hyper-realistic but it's getting better and better.

At many points in my life I have tried to do sketching and recognize my problems in your description of symbol drawing. Since you sound knowledgeable about it could you possibly recommend something that expands on that topic, and gives advice for learning to draw that is centered on that concept?

Learn to sculpt! For me, a few hours making faces from clay was all it took to teach my mind the mapping from 3d to 2d. This forces you to think from 2d to 3d by taking an image you have in your mind and forcing you to build 3d support for it.

Then, do still life sketches of what you sculpt, no matter how bad. This seemed to reinforce the other direction for me.

That and play Descent 2.

I've always struggled with drawing organic 3D things, and this is probably part of why.

> A person who practices incorrectly

So how does one practice correctly?

Life model drawing, drawing what you see instead of what you thing it should look like

Ahh. Is this also what makes a lot of high school art--and even adult art--look amateurish?

Yeah.

Looks almost perfect to me, it's just the eyes and hands that consistently seem messed up.

The eyes look really creepy somehow. It's like it is two different eyes.