Using AI to Animate Children’s Drawings | Hacker News Reader

Using AI to Animate Children’s Drawings

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"You grant to Meta and its affiliated companies, licensees and representatives, on behalf of you and any child who created any item of Materials that you submit to the Demo, a perpetual, irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, distribute, perform and display (publicly or otherwise), modify, create derivative works of, host and otherwise use the Materials, Animations and Modifications in connection with the Demo."

Isn’t this just legalese for “let us use your drawings as training data”?

You don't need to publicly display or own the likeness in perpetuity if it was just training data

Yeah, but you open yourself up for lawsuits. People being like "my toddler drew a lion 10 years ago, and the model trained on that data brings in revenue and I would like some of that". Legal boilerplate isn't designed to be a reasonable conversation between people, it's meant to try and immunize the company from crazy lawsuits.

Very nice. I just can't trust FB with my children's time/attention.

Why should you trust any technology that is designed to zombify children into inactivity and media consumption?

You probably shouldn't, and I don't think the parent poster would disagree.

Just because they said they don't trust FB doesn't mean they implicitly trust everyone/thing else.

I think we should be careful of addictive technology in general, and it should be seen as a classifier rather than inherent tech innovation or new threats. Video games for instance can be very addicting, I wish I had done things differently. Drugs can be seen as obvious addictions but dopamine hits from electronics isn’t seen the same way.

When you hand a child technology (tablet,phone,etc.), who do you trust?

Apple. (on a trust but verify status)

Apple provides the blank slate (unless they have child apps I am unaware of), do you mean the app store?

Seems like this would be super useful for a 2D game engine, especially one aimed at beginners, where you could sketch a character, describe an animation you want and export a game asset (or even better an editable art asset to fine tune if required).

They just keep coming for the kids.

This isn't even redeemable from a technical perspective as Disney has been doing this same thing on their cruise ships -in the Animator's Palate dining hall- for at least a decade.

The technically interesting thing is the automatic generation of the "bones", something the Disney solution does not do - they make you draw your character within a predefined grid.

It's definitely technically interesting.

But it's too bad that every new piece of technology nowadays has a huge asterisk attached: please sign away your family's privacy and security, We Promise You Can Trust Us. I guess I'll just have to pass.

> This isn't even redeemable from a technical perspective as Disney has been doing this same thing on their cruise ships -in the Animator's Palate dining hall- for at least a decade.

The main interesting part about Facebook's approach is inferring bones from a humanoid drawing (even if other unrelated objects are on the page). From what I can tell off of some Youtube videos, the Disney version has guests draw the bones already separated on a template like this: https://i.imgur.com/AGxvsFq.png

A couple more things Facebook's method appears to handle better, but wouldn't be strictly out-of-reach for traditional methods, are morphing the limbs rather than having them as separate detached parts and identifying which parts of the background are inside of the figure so should be kept opaque. Comparison: https://i.imgur.com/KlJbtqy.png

Yes, true. I should have chosen my words more carefully. While the technology is better in a number of ways and the result is incrementally better in this specific application, the incrementally better result is arguably not worth the technical lengths and costs it took to get it. And what is not redeemable is the enticement, see here: https://imgur.com/vCyJgRE

This might be more for the parents of kids since the fun/crazy drawings of children stop at about the age of 6 or so :)

I know this is innocent (maybe not) but who approved this at fb... maybe don't frame this as building AI that will capture kids attentions. Why does it even need to be framed like this... it could be stick figures or ANYTHING. Its comical.

I imagine they might just be detached enough from reality to imagine that this would actually raise their image - doing something family-friendly or whatever.

They’re not detached. They know everything about you and people around you to infer sentiments and make very good decisions.

Found a silly sketch of me by my partner and it worked a treat: https://sketch.metademolab.com/share/c9c289362dca4d4d96ee5b4...

Of course the resemblance is spooky.

My, that's a very long... arm... you have.

For anyone interested in non-AI animated children's drawings and wanting a particularly strange addition to your day, I might also point some attention to Sünnipäev, a very bizarre and surprisingly meaningful (after enough watches) 1994 Estonian cartoon by Janno Põldma based on a similar concept (no Estonian needed!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6EK89x00GI

Neat tech, looks like fun! However, I kinda think there should be a requirement with AI techniques like this to show the cases when it doesn't work well, to help cool the hype :)

That's a good point. FB/Meta did a blog post talking about the tech. There are some failure examples there:

https://ai.facebook.com/blog/using-ai-to-bring-childrens-dra...

This or the demo itself should be the actual submitted link.

This is impressive. Here is the direct link to the demo: https://sketch.metademolab.com/

Why do they wait with sharing the code and dataset?

Wow, I'm no Facebook fan but a little surprised to see so much vitriol. I guess that's what I get for turning on 'showdead'.

I have concerns about how FB would leverage this work with respect to children, sure. But I also think that the research itself leads to an application that seems like it would be very entertaining.

Well thats... horrifying. Grabbed a monster image off google to see how it goes.

https://sketch.metademolab.com/share/997996cb413a4590860268e...

Oh, the things we'll get before we get flying cars ...

We have flying cars already, they are called “Cessna”.

It doesn’t look it it will fit in my car port.

You're just living in the wrong place https://www.thedrive.com/news/38555/wide-streets-massive-gar...

my dream neighborhood. I wonder if all the garages are just stuffed with a bunch of crap and people keep the planes parked in the driveway.

That made me laugh. This neighborhood is in California, so it's not so farfetched.

Practical flying cars were invented in 1950: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerocar. From what I can tell, there wasn't enough demand.

It's a clever way to crowdsource a dataset of drawings with its corresponding skeleton, so they can recognize drawn bipeds in kid pictures.

Why not leave the kids drawings alone and let the kids animate them in their own imaginations? Or teach the kids to animate them?

Nah, because no VC can back that.

When there is no more human imagination left in the world, no one will be able to buy it back.

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