Using AI to bring children’s drawings to life (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Using AI to bring children’s drawings to life (2021)

ai.facebook.com

115 pointsmyth_drannon35 comments

My brain -

Awww... that is such a nice thing. But why would anyone post this to facebook? Wait a minute ai.facebook! That is such facebook thing to do. They just couldn't stop with this meta stuff. And now they are targeting kids to harvest data.

Let me see what security issues that are being discussed in the comment section. You know what I will put everything I was thinking up to this point as a comment itself.

I remember about 20 years ago in school, playing with a tool like this. It also had something for the mouth that would make it look like its talking.

Sometimes I feel like so little progress or so much progress is made in the same day.

Unfortunately meta has lost so much trust with the world that anything, even well meaning, will be met with such skepticism as to render it unimpactful.

Scientists and devs at meta - is this the most meaningful way you can spend your valuable life?

There's lots of scepticism from some tech or political circles sure, but I don't think the population in general cares. The latest Oculus got bad reviews because it's so tied to Facebook, and it's since sold over 10 million.

It could maybe have sold some extra before Christmas but when I asked at my local electronic store he said he would not recommend it ojt of principle.

Not sure I would have bought anyway, but when the sales guy in the store openly admit he doesn't want to sell it then you know you have a PR problem :-)

> is this the most meaningful way you can spend your valuable life?

Yes. I work on WhatsApp, which is the best[1] messaging app among those that make an effort to be relevant for the "next billion" internet users. There are probably people in Ukraine right now who are relying on the work we do. I wouldn't be able to say the same had I worked on some *aaS CRUD app (not that there's anything wrong with that!)

1. IMO, I probably am biased.

Looks like people over there are using Signal more https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1496933418197651461?cx...

Is there a particular reason for an outsized percentage of the activities being various forms of martial arts?

Is this a common existing training set for example?

In the app itself it's only a small percentage.

This was solved by my buddy's startup 10 years ago: https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/where-are-they-now-grafight...

Disney has been doing something similar for years: https://superparent.com/article/276/osmo-and-disney-make-kid...

I remember an article that they had something more general (not just Frozen) available for children on cruise ships, I think. I can't find that article but this technical concept has been around for some time

From the video, it appears what Disney is doing is much simpler compared to the techniques in the article. It seems children are simply "filling in" parts of existing figures (e.g. the Mickey Mouse ears shown in the video), which are then animated. This seems to me like a less challenging problem, as all the rigging/joint/etc stuff that Meta is doing can be done by-hand, beforehand, in the Disney case, it does not need any ML. The cool thing with Meta's system is that it (hypothetically) works on arbitrary human-like figures.

While Meta is creepy, this is pretty awesome. I could imagine a platform that allows you to animate a few characters & backgrounds to make an animated storybook or cartoon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kid_Pix#Kid_Pix_Studio

Where's the live online demo where I can upload something and watch it work? Without that I have no confidence that the system actually works.

[EDIT] Sorry, missed that!

It's linked in the article. https://sketch.metademolab.com/

I've tried it and also asked my mother to draw something, and it's really cool and fun! This could be incredibly useful in the animation industry mostly because of the automatic rigging, placing the bones of the character onto the correct location! I hope they turn this into a tool and let us play and create cool stuff with it!

It might look nice to adults, but kids really don’t need to see a machine outdo them. It might frustrate them, and give up.

Hm. KidPix was a #1 bestseller for years. Kids loved it. Not sure today's kids are harmed by seeing their creativity come to life.

A periodic reminder that any innocent-looking, seemingly-pure fun research coming from Meta AI will eventually be weaponized for their massive ad-based business model. No for-profit keeps a research division just for the sake of science.

Technology companies are generally bad at commercializing the fruit of their research divisions. Consider Xerox PARC, Microsoft Research, Nokia Research…

Given personal experience working at large ad companies, this is not close to true. Many research projects exist that are not directly tied to revenue generation.

If it was another company doing this I'd be in two minds as to whether or not it was creepy. With Facebook doing it, I'm convinced.

by analyzing your child's drawings we're able to determine with 90% accuracy what content to push at them over the next decade to turn them into a school shooter! Not that we would do that unless somebody paid us.

Yeah it will be interesting to see how they use this to sell adspace for kids.

If it makes you feel better, there's no data being collected other than the images and annotation fixes (and that only occurs if you click 'agree' on the consent page).

You also don't need to be signed in Facebook or anything to use the demo- there's no way to link the uploaded images with personal information about the artist/uploader.

Maybe they're just trying to buy some goodwill + people growing up with positive memories of FB may be more likely to open an account etc

This is great.

If only Meta focused their power and talent to more projects like this...

Something like this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30443466

(Create a world only using your voice)

https://quill.art/ started as a rather unique team at Oculus. But, yeah... Too artsy for FB. So, now it is independently owned by the people who made it.

Nice, but I'm still not giving Meta anything especially my child's art

Ah yes, it's easy to forget that children's drawings aren't already alive in their (and their parents) imagination, and that we need to ship some personal (and in some ways, sensitive and later nostalgic) data to a for-profit entity in order to achieve that. Glad to have 'em around!

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Duly noted, thank you.

Shallow dismissals can be an indication of a knee-jerk reaction, potentially based on existing biases and/or life experiences, as opposed to the kind of rational examination that makes HN enjoyable.

The fact that they're disallowed on Hacker News changes the tone of conversation here significantly, relative to other social media; comments that stop and make the reader think -- preferably with supporting references and at-minimum-plausible arguments -- are valued, and the resulting perception of the community by participants is one of an intelligent, well-mannered collegiate environment (with healthy competition). In other words, the kind of surroundings that have traditionally been associated with long-standing centres of education.

Whether that perception is accurate (or desirable, honestly) is, I'd argue, up for debate. As would be whether the use of the term 'hacker' itself has diverged between its origins[1] and the context in which it's used here.

No: it wasn't a knee-jerk reaction; this company appears to be awful and given their repeated behaviour, this seems like standard practice for them. I do not dismiss the hard work and ingenuity of the people who developed the feature -- I'm sure it was challenging and rewarding as they saw it -- but I don't believe that "hard work", "impressive work" and "good work" are always overlapping elements in a venn diagram.

[1] - http://tmrc.mit.edu/hackers-ref.html

I wanted to reply here to support what you wrote above, but my way of articulating it would be:

"just because it's cool and can be done, doesn't mean that it needs to be done".

Especially when it comes to things built+used for children's imaginative play. It reminds me of the classic LEGO ad:

https://imgur.com/gallery/xwAsW56

Reply on news.ycombinator.com