MegaPortraits: One-Shot Megapixel Neural Head Avatars
samsunglabs.github.io
samsunglabs.github.io
Back in the old days, Disney and other animation studios rotoscoped actors performances by drawing over the original image (by hand) each frame. It won't be long now before you just have an artist create a few examples of concept art, and just video the performances of the actors without much / any special setup other than maybe wearing a tracking suit.
How many years away are we from the point where you can just type in a script (or just put in some writing prompts and have an AI generate a script), describe the direction for the actors ("bend over and pick up the bucket", "exit stage left"), and then just churn out a movie?
If you pick up just a little bit of skill with animation, compositing, and such you're a one-person movie studio. Crazy times. This is not what I imagined the future was going to look like, but it will be entertaining.
What actors? There are a lot of writers who will jump at the opportunity to skip all the translation and re-interpretation by others and directly build the visuals as they go. Some of this will be extremely cringeworthy, but a lot of it will be astonishingly good.
How long until AI can measure my brain response and adjust the script in real time to make the film less predictable, more exciting, relaxing, humorous or engaging based on how I'm feeling?
It's not a massive leap from what you described.
And once AI is capable of replacing the "social experience" of movie viewing, humanity might not be far away from having rendered itself obsolete.
A group of friends all contributing in some way. Afterwards discussing the parts of the film that they might have been responsible for willing into existence.
While I think this idea has a lot of potential, it bugs me too.
You'll be able to convert from video into a screenplay, edit some text, then render to video again.
Won't somebody think of the investors?
Try the demos here (and be sure to experiment with the "speaking style" parameter box, and try out the "(Neural) Preview" voices for US English): https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-service...
GPT-3 hasn't taken over social media.
Dall-e 2 hasn't put all graphical artists out of a job.
In general, when looking at some phenomena, don't only look at the primary measurement (e.g. f(x)). It is often useful to look at the derivative (e.g. df/dx) as well.
P.S. The second derivative also may be informative as well. Keep going if you want.
Humility and less overconfidence, please. You aren't omniscient. You aren't in every room where these technologies have been discussed.
Just wait until these things start to trickle down to the "plebs" like us and non-technical people. The amount of compute required to re-create and run these systems is the main bottleneck for now, but once the hardware is there and the models shrink to make them easier to run... that's when things will get fascinating.
Like, if you're trying to smear someone, using big media and abusing the courts to fuck them up (say, Assange or Hale or Reality Winner) makes this look like a Fisher Price toy club next to an uzi.
If you're trying to sway an election, the big data and subtle ads (and again, big media and the courts) makes far more of a difference than this. Think Brexit, Trump 2016, the count in Florida in 2000, Diebold machines, etc.
If you're trying to topple a government / make taxpayers pay a huge bailout / start an illegal war / etc, etc, etc - this is just another small tool; the leather punching tool on a vast penknife.
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Conversely, the creative potential may be larger than most suspect. To me, this feels like we're getting close to something like the holodeck in Star Trek, where people can share the fruit of their imagination with anyone for virtually no cost (IP lawyers shudder, like Lionel Hutz imagining a world without lawyers).
It's often missed that "the rest" includes plausible deniability. As states become ever more infatuated with surveillance, this is going to become extremely important.
Trying to measure the overall social impact is notoriously hard. I doubt that "counting" applications is a useful way to do it.
Let me refine the initial idea (above) into two more detailed ones:
1. What are the specific aspects of why this technology might have negative social implications? How might these be mitigated?
2. Who or what (people, institutions, norms, guidelines, laws, incentives, etc.) can help increase the chances that such technology is (a) well understood; (b) designed conscientiously; and (c) deployed reasonably?
Seems pretty obvious to me. People are notoriously hard-to-patch components of any IT/social system, and exploiting them with this kind of tech is possible, because they are hardwired to expect that video faking is scarce.
> 2. Who or what (people, institutions, norms, guidelines, laws, incentives, etc.) can help increase the chances that such technology is (a) well understood; (b) designed conscientiously; and (c) deployed reasonably?
The horses have bolted the barn. You literally cannot stop anyone with enough GPUs/AI accelerators from replicating a free-for-all version of any "conscientious" AI scheme, unless we ban general purpose computation.
This tech is already here. There's no taking it back easily.
People will learn to distrust video content once fake videos become commonplace so direct exploitation is only really a short term problem - at most for one generation of people growing up with friends making funny videos of things they didn't do. The longer-term problem is the loss of trust in video content used as evidence. OTOH as others have pointed out this might actually be a positive thing too considering the increasing amount of video surveillance that will too become less trustworthy and thereby also less of a problem.
> unless we ban general purpose computation.
Now that's a scary thought - it's unfortunatly already all too commonly accepted that people can't be trusted to decide what to run on their devices.
For sure, but there's a window of opportunity in which an attacker can really do a lot of damage. Not much can be done about it, but it's worthy of keeping in mind.
> Now that's a scary though - it's unfortunatly already all too commonly accepted that people can't be trusted to decide what to run on their devices.
Yeah. Not that long ago banning general purpose computation seemed fanciful, but it's not as taboo today (and flipped to being the norm on device classes like the portables).
Right, I don't expect it to be easy, but it is important. My emphasis here is to ask and get some perspectives on "How do we do it?" rather than leave the conversation dangling with a vague sense of, e.g., "it is too hard..."
I'm very tempted to replace my Teams camera with this.
Aside, this would be sick for realtime apps, like, imagine you just get a good professional photo or two done and then drive those with your webcam? It'd be like making a vtuber of yourself