City Does Not Exist

Brilliant!

Would be nice to have an actual pipe-generating AI.

What pipe? That's not a pipe.

When one knows the other dirty meaning of "pipe" in French, one can wonder if Magritte had a dirty sens of humour.

Unfortunately, the joke misses (or misses me) a bit.

But it does seem like there is a critical distinction between 'this is not a pipe' and 'this pipe does not exist'.

The original targets the distinction between the image and the 'reality', the difference between the map and the territory and our linguistic/perceptual confusions as to such.

In this case however, this 'pipe' does exist. It can't be said to exists in terms of reference to an object outside of the image, but the image itself is as extant as any image. We could argue about issues of permanence---what happens when I turn my device off and the data representing such in memory and on the screen evaporates?, etc---but likewise the universe (at least according to current scientific understanding) is likely to 'evaporate', so in that regard the 'real' world is just as permanent as the image on a screen that is only a temporary electrical phenomena interacting with human perception.

Maybe I've missed something or am overthinking it.

(And yes, it's just a joke website, but if a joke can't lead one to spiraling into existential despair at the nature of existence, what's the point?)

This is Not A Pipe That Exists, which returns some AI convolution of many pipes with some heavy weighting toward the Magritte pipe would be ideal for me.

As someone spending time looking at satellite and orthographic photos, i agree, this looks weird. City grid looks like cloth texture, roads and rivers make no sense. In any case, it manages to slightly impress me.

I'm surprised you managed to notice that. The images are so low res.

Yep. I was quite impressed by how mine appeared to stick bridges in logical positions. Then I noticed one of them only got halfway across the river...

I wonder if you could improve this GAN by taking a cropped part of each generated image and trying to discriminate against that part of the image as well.

Because the problem seems to be in the details. The GAN is great at the global picture but the details are off. And this problem benefits from the fact that a picture of a section of a city should also be recognized as a picture of a city.

Dang does not exist.

Emailing HN moderators is the best way to reach (without loss of generality) dang

Sometimes the HN algo will strip what it thinks is non-essential leading words from submissions. When it does that, the contributor can edit the title to replace it ... and the algo won't argue.

You mean, things like humanity? On a more serious note, I think it's kind of cool that archaeology has sometimes worked in kind of the opposite way; everyone assumed the Trojan War was just made up, and then they found Troy.

Yeah, stop writing novels! Plato was right.

I've started to think that the plausibility of recovering a lot of the digital data we're creating in the case of a nuclear winter might be really low. Imagine walking a wasteland of abandoned computers in a fallout-style land. The vast majority would be behind passwords and even when it wouldn't, the internet wouldn't be accessible. Raid serverfarms? They'll be torn apart for metal or even if not, behind even stronger encryption than regular computers. Feels like our accumulated knowledge is a lot more fragile than we acknowledge.

This tutorial does not exist.

This tutorial doesn't exist.

This HN comment doesn't exist

General adversarial networks

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network

God does not exist

First, you have to collect a few thousand images of the same thing (maybe more or less depending on how complex your thing is or how good the results should be). Then, you train a generative adversarial neural network on those images to generate new images. https://github.com/NVlabs/stylegan2-ada-pytorch works quite well. https://github.com/NVlabs/stylegan3 is supposedly even better, but I did not try it yet.

not a tutorial, but here is how they did it: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/18t0k17k0Xxo0BXMdjl6m...

I was thinking that too but this seems to be in line with the https://thispersondoesnotexist.com series of websites where they are AI generated

Na ... I can see some part of it right now ... although maybe that is just what they want me to tell you.

I wanted to post the same comment but luckily remembered to use the search function!

In the light of current Russian military activities: Borne Sulinowo

That ruptured eyeball peninsula is prime real estate.

Where flap the tatters of the Yellow King...

That's gonna be the title of the Ukraine reconstruction project.